In order to understand the seemingly divided and violent psychology which afflicts the United States of America, you must have an understanding of the slavery-based economy of the Southern American states, and the fact that perhaps the most important event in the history of the independent United States, the Civil War of 1861 to 1865, was fought over the issue of slavery. (The Northern American states were manufacturing-based, as opposed to being centered on agriculture.)

When the thirteen American colonies began to fight for independence from Great Britain in 1775, they were assisted by the French military. The Americans then wrote their Declaration of Independence from the British King George III in 1776.

The enslavement and free labor of slaves kidnapped from Africa dominated the economies of the European-owned colonies in the so-called New World. The Europeans who became wealthy from slave labor in America included Great Britain, France, Spain, Portugal, and the Netherlands. The Europeans used slave labor for mining and agricultural purposes.

C. L. R. James, in his 1938 The Black Jacobins, wrote that French-owned Haiti (then called “San Domingue”) was the richest colony in the world when the French Revolution broke out in Paris, the French capital, in July of 1789. 

The worry for slave-owning planters was always derived from the fact that increase in one’s cash crop production entailed an increase in the number of slaves one could import to work in one’s fields. More slaves, more production, more money. But what the Haitian Revolution proved when it broke out in 1791 was that more slaves meant more danger. There were half a million African slaves in San Domingue, perhaps ten times as many as the French slave owners who held them in bondage.

A few hundred miles north of Haiti, in the southern part of the United States, the cash crop was cotton, not sugar cane. The success of the slave rebellion in Haiti, predictably, caused great alarm in the American South. In the early nineteenth century, after Haiti declared itself an independent black republic (on January 1, 1804), white American slave owners were jittery, made more so by the slave revolts of Denmark Vesey, Gabriel Prosser, and Nat Turner.

There were some prominent slave owners who began to think that the population mix, featuring so many enslaved blacks, was too dangerous, and a movement started which focused on shipping the slaves back to Africa. In his book, Mississippi in Africa, Alan Huffman in 2010 wrote of this movement, which resulted in the establishment in Liberia, a West African country, of a settlement of Africans who had been enslaved in America. This would have been in the 1830s, 1840s thereabouts.

In our lifetime, there have been some violent disputes (civil wars, actually) between native African Liberians and African Liberians of American origin. I loaned out my copy of Huffman’s book recently, and I am not up to date on Liberian history.

But, the thinking in the white South which led to some leaders concluding that it was best to export the slaves back to Africa, was not a majority thinking. The wealthy slave owners of the American South began to become more and more angry over the so-called Abolitionist movement in the Northern U.S. states which considered slavery an abomination and wanted the Africans freed.

The differences between the Southern slave owners and the Northern Abolitionists led to the aforementioned American Civil War. The so-called MAGA (Make America Great Again) base which supports everything Donald Trump does is comprised to a great extent of descendants of the former slave owners of the American South. How one includes the descendants of the “poor whites” of the South in MAGA is a bit tricky for me. I say this, because I assume that there were more “poor whites” in the South than there were wealthy slave owners.

I am not an expert in American history. I only have a broad outline in my mind. But, I return to the “seemingly divided and violent psychology” which is beginning to afflict the U.S., and in this column I have attempted to give you a sense of how the historic issue of slavery may be affecting the perspective of the American right.