Scene on Radio · Kenan Institute for Ethics at Duke University

S7 E5: A New Thing in Human History

July 17, 2024·50 min·5 clips

Historian Woody Holton says the American Revolution was driven by resistance to British meddling in slaveholding and land speculation.

1776 is the hinge. The conversation starts with the familiar break from the British crown, then turns toward the economic changes forming around the same moment. The patriotic version is easy to recognize. President Biden's Philadelphia speech about Valley Forge is used as an example of a civic memory built around founding courage. The episode lingers on what that memory leaves out. The frame widens from there, linking Adam Smith and the American Revolution to a much harder story about capitalism's rise. Cotton becomes the main piece of evidence. Historian Edward Baptist describes cotton in the first half of the nineteenth century as the world's most traded and valuable commodity. The comparison lands plainly: like oil in the present, cotton organized mills, fields, expansion, and power. The United States had an edge. Europe had textile mills, but the new nation had cotton land, domestic mills, and leaders willing to push outward. That expansion came before the wagon-train version many people remember. Before Oregon and California, the frontier moved into the old southwest, now called the southeast. That meant taking land. The narration names deals with France and Spain, including the Louisiana Purchase and Mississippi Territory, while keeping Indigenous dispossession at the center. Cherokee, Choctaw, Creek, Chickasaw, and Seminole peoples were defeated and pushed out through wars and forced treaties. Then white settlement and slavery moved together into Tennessee, Georgia, Alabama, Florida, Mississippi, Texas, and Louisiana, alongside an enslaved African American population Baptist places at about two million.

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