America’s sordid racial story begins with involuntary immigration and slavery. Race-based bondage was enshrined in the country’s legal system at the Constitutional Convention of 1787. At that time, according to Edmund Morgan, Yale’s renowned colonial historian, slavery was considered a “moral anachronism.” The delegates could not have insisted on the abolition of slavery, noted Morgan: “To have done so would have ended the convention.” The young struggling republic faced an ugly choice—a nation with slavery, or no nation at all.
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Two trading states, Connecticut and South Carolina, provided the support that enabled the approval of the Constitution. Connecticut’s anti-slavery representatives viewed the institution as being on the road to extinction. Slavery was “dying out anyway,” Connecticut’s constitutional delegate Roger Sherman said, and would “by degrees disappear.” “Slavery in time,” opined his colleague Oliver Ellsworth, “will not be a speck on the horizon.” Sherman, the grandfather of the Civil War general William Tecumseh Sherman, helped broker the constitutional compromises that protected what some Southerners denominated “our peculiar institution,” slavery.
What happened to this prophecy of extinction? Slavery would have died without the coincidence of two events. A series of innovations in the British cotton textile industry by the late eighteenth century fostered mass production. Correspondingly, the price of a textile garment dropped by over 90 percent between 1787 and 1860. A consumer revolution was born. At
