How Did Chattel Slavery Shaped The American Republic

Only a few centuries ago, the idea of another human being becoming property was normalized and brought a surplus of benefits into the eyes of enslavers in America. The argument over possessing another human being was due to many reasons, including a necessary evil that brought monetary gain and biblical reasoning. Altogether, these reasons withheld the racist ideology of white supremacy and initially led the American Republic to see African Americans as inferior and to feel comfortable with Chattel slavery, the property of an enslaved person. Chattel slavery shaped the American Republic by economically benefitting it with the production of cotton, politically and financially encompassing the South, and finally, shaped many different American
This issue slowed down its production until Eli Whitney created the cotton gin (Foner, 2019, p. 336). The cotton gin could quickly remove the seed from the rest of the cotton; it made production perform much quicker and improved sales, which drove the demand for more enslaved people. Due to the cotton expansion, the rest of slavery began to expand in the United States (Foner, 2019, p. 336). Cotton expansion led many states to overtake fields and fill them with cotton plantations, which began spreading in different land masses, including South Carolina. Interestingly enough, South Carolina reopened the African Slave Trade for 5 years before Congress federally governed it to remove immigration from enslaved people within the Atlantic Slave Trade (Foner, 2019, p.
Henry Hammond went far enough to even vocalize “No power on earth dares to make war upon it; Cotton is king.” (Foner, 2019, p. 410). Often relying on the economic benefit from slavery in the South, many Southerners desired to live self-sufficiently, and that led most Southern states to lack a strong education, leaving them more illiterate than those up north (Foner, 2019, p. 410). Though Southerners were economically benefitted, their northern counterparts seemed to succeed much more internally, leaving the idea of the comfortable, simple-minded, and slave-owning southerners referred to as "Plain Folk" (Foner, 2019, p. 410). It did not take long until the United States became the center of New World slavery once the British Empire followed through with abolition, making cotton surpass sugar as the most grown crop produced by slave labor. Nevertheless, a divide between the North and South became evident once the idea of abolition was fulfilled in the North. At the Constitutional Convention, the topic of the use of slavery was brought up. People like Madison and Jefferson perceived slavery negatively, yet were slave