In the debate about reparations to the descendants of slaves, proponents of this often compare the issue to payments Holocaust slave laborers are now receiving from several German corporations that made use of slave labor during WWII.
It occurred to me to wonder: are there any existing corporations which had existed since before the Civil War and were primarily based in what was briefly the Confederate States of America? I know slave labor was common on plantations, especially cotton ones, but unlike Carnegie’s US Steel or Rockefeller’s Standard Oil, I’ve never heard of any major cotton corporation from back then. Any other major industries in the antebellum South that relied to a great degree on slave labor? Any continuous existence of a corporate entity from then to now?
After all, if such can be found, I could see it rationally argued that that corporation does owe some form of reparation.
There weren’t large corporations that grew cotton, if that’s what you’re thinking. Cotton plantations were owned by families. There were large companies (by the standards of the day) that turned the cotton into cloth and clothing, but they were largely in England. Megacorporations like Carnegie Steel didn’t become widespread until after the Civil War.
This is treading on Great Debates territory, but who would you pay reparations to? No ex-slave is alive today. There are, of course, decendants of those slaves, but giving the degree of migration, name-changing, and intermarriage, it would be a practical nightmare to find those descendants and show their precise relationships to slaves. It would also be a moral nightmare to figure out a fair formula for compensation.
Not all injustices can be corrected. The wrongs done to those long-dead literally cannot be undone.
Nope. No “Big Cotton”. Here’s how the cotton economy worked in a nutshell: Cotton was plucked, ginned, and baled on the plantations and purchased by factorage centers in the urban areas. These factors would act as suppliers for the planters and extend loans to them to be repaid in cotton at the end of the growing cycle minus fees and commission. Brokers would buy the bales of cotton on behalf of industry. It was then transported to ports like New Orleans to be shipped overseas to England and France. Cotton used in the United States was purchased by “cotton corporations”, based in the North, which were owned by the same people who owned the Northern textile mills.
The antebellum cotton economy wasn’t composed of monothlic corporations like today’s argibusiness. For example, New Orleans received about one-third of all cotton grown in the United States and was processed by about 250 different companies. The factorage system was later supplanted and it is doubtful that any of the pre civil war cotton businesses remain. Any that do, have at best, a tenuous connection to slave labor.
Before the war, there was little industry in the whole of the South, and no “major industry” worth mentioning. What did exist was mostly confined to Kentucky, Maryland, Delaware and parts of Virginia. Although there was a rapid build-up during the war, even its busiest factories no longer exist. The Tredegar Iron Works comes to mind. The Confederacy’s capital was primarily tied to land and slaves.
Oh well, I guess that statement dooms this thread to GD. Let’s pay reparations only to the people who deserve them - former slaves. We’ll collect the money from the only people who benefited directly - former slave owners and traders. That’s rational.
I would think that any major industries, like railroads, would have long since gone bankrupt or been absorbed.
I personally recall a fellow named Mullaney cleaning out a wearhouse in Galveston and throwing out cost records of slaves laying gas pipes for lighting dated around 1855-56. But the company he worked for, Southern Union Gas, only traces it’s history to 1926.
No “Big Cotton,” but there certainly was “King Cotton.” Though that just makes reference to the fact that cotton was a (the) key driver of the South’s economy.