Freedom as Accumulation

Abstract

This chapter reassembles the immediate and concrete history of abolition after 1865, from the counter of the Southern country store to the international trade in cotton, as it sorts out the mechanisms of law and arrangements of political economy that chaperoned the tremendous value incarnated in slaves across the gulf of the Civil War. It explains how citizenship for the formerly enslaved was tethered to the racialization of debt and how the legal relations of formal abolition were actually economic relations of credit. This chapter analyzes the legal history of the Fourteenth Amendment and the interlocking forms of theft it enabled, from Southern sharecropping to New York corporations, from the Freedman’s Bank to the U.S. national debt, showing how liberalism is enmeshed with colonialism. Through a landmark Supreme Court case in 1897, this chapter describes how the personhood of the freed enabled the white accumulation of finance capital through global cotton markets, engaging with the theories of Giovanni Arrighi and world-systems analysis.