frog & fog (3)
After the American Revolutionary War ended, both the American people and government fell into a severe debt crisis.
Slavery distorted the normal division of classes. In a capitalist society, classes were normally determined by how much wealth and means of production a person controlled. Yet America classified people according to how many slaves they owned. To slaveholders in the American South, slaves were both means of production and profit-generating capital.
The Portuguese had used this model in the eighteenth century. The faster slaves died, the greater the plantations' demand became. Slave ships used trade goods as collateral to secure loans on credit, then went to slave markets to meet slave hunters. Once the slaves reached Brazil, credit became the driving force again. Plantations were often heavily indebted, and planters had no choice but to keep buying slaves and producing sugar, cotton, tobacco, and so on to repay previous loans.
Whippings were minor matters. The main thing was that when slaves fell ill, slaveholders would not spend money treating them and simply let them die, because treating a slave might cost more than buying a new one.
How could people never get sick? How could someone, while strong and healthy, imagine that they might one day fall ill? A sovereign nation's credit rating was not based on the wealth it actually possessed, but on its ability to repay debts, gross production, foreign trade, and other such factors. Britain always repaid what it borrowed, so it had a high credit rating. America had also spent money fighting the American Revolutionary War, and its current gross production depended entirely on agriculture—that was, on Southern planters.
With the end of the American Revolutionary War, it was time to divide up property. America and Britain had signed a "peace treaty," which