My comment here wasn't about slavery. It was about the claim that america was founded on the principle of government by the consent of the governed.
I think your response proves my point.
> One way to see this is to look at the state constitutions written in this era.
Well, minus the whole slavery thing enshrined in half of them (not to mention landownership requirements that lasted until the civil war in some places, and the net reduction in voting rights in the early 1800s).
Like even at its founding, the US was only marginally better than the UK in terms of enfranchisement. About 2% of Philidelphians were eligible voters. That's the capital of a free state with only a few slaves.
> . A relatively small class of plantation owners got rich off slavery. They didn't redistribute the proceeds across the entire white population. Economically, the slave-owning South, as a whole, lagged far behind the North, and slavery is a likely cause for that economic backwardness.
The south, for the 17th time were not the only people who benefitted. Northern businesses that depended on various plantation based exports also gained.
But even still, I agree that your average white farmer didn't gain a lot, that's true of capitalist economies, not slavery in particular. The gilded age didn't fix wealth inequality.
The bigger question is whether or not the relatively rich and influential southern plantation owners had an outsized impact on, say, the development of universities and such.
This was absolutely a central principle of the revolution. The objections to taxation by Parliament rested on the colonists' lack of representation in that body.
> Like even at its founding, the US was only marginally better than the UK in terms of enfranchisement. About 2% of Philidelphians were eligible voters.
Perhaps at the founding of the US that was true, but Pennsylvania passed a radically democratic state constitution in 1776 that was highly innovative and unusual in many ways (e.g., a council elected by the people every 7 years to review all laws passed since the last council, with the power to veto any law they considered unconstitutional). The new state constitution granted the right to vote to any man who paid taxes, which by 1787 was nearly 90% of the adult white male population.
> Northern businesses that depended on various plantation based exports also gained.
How did they gain from slavery? They could but cotton from anywhere, and if the South wasn't delivering, they could import it from other countries. The argument works much better in reverse: Southern plantation owners depended critically on the rapidly expanding British and American textile industries. The planters were delivering a relatively low-tech, raw product. The textile mills didn't particularly care how it was produced, and they had multiple sources they could buy it from.
> The gilded age didn't fix wealth inequality.
But it did deliver much more economic development than the old slaveocracy.
Right, but the replacement didn't functionally address the broad issue of consent of the governed. It replaced a government of wealthy white gentry with a wealthy white gentry in a different location. Your average American citizen didn't actually gain much, if anything, in terms of representation. Only the upper class did (which is, in many ways, the class we're arguing about).
> Perhaps at the founding of the US that was true, but Pennsylvania passed a radically democratic state constitution in 1776 that was highly innovative and unusual in many ways
And it was practically unique in that regard. The NJ constitution had a wealth requirement and, despite originally granting women and free black people the right to vote, it later rescinded those rights!
Not to mention a Constitution like South Carolinas, which required slave ownership to hold public office.
But more importantly, while the US was busy regressing from the founding principles it only halfheartedly upheld, other nations were busy drafting and creating new constitutions that better uphold those ideals. And tot he point I keep returning to: our deification of the original constitution prevents many necessary improvements in that regard.
> But it did deliver much more economic development than the old slaveocracy.
I don't think I've said otherwise. You seem to think the argument I'm making somehow relies on slavery being a lynchpin of the American economy. It doesn't. It only requires that it have been present.
You're completely wrong about this. You just have to look at the constitutional changes in the states and the huge growth in participation in politics in the 1780s. The revolution was a mass movement, and it had a profound effect on how the general population viewed politics and on what sort of government they were willing to accept.
> And it was practically unique in that regard. The NJ constitution had a wealth requirement and, despite originally granting women and free black people the right to vote, it later rescinded those rights!
Pennsylvania wrote the most democratic state constitution, but it was not at all unique in overhauling its system of government to become much more participatory. New Jersey's 1776 state constitution lowered property requirements, replaced the royal governor with a governor selected by the elected legislature, and reduced his powers (e.g., no veto power), and as you point out, removed racial and gender restrictions to voting.
> But more importantly, while the US was busy regressing from the founding principles it only halfheartedly upheld, other nations were busy drafting and creating new constitutions that better uphold those ideals.
The US was one of the only democratic republics in the world well into the 19th century. That's the context for Lincoln's statement that the United States was "the last best hope of earth." The 1848 revolutions in Continental Europe had been crushed, and the US appeared to many to be the only major democratic country left standing.
> It only requires that it have been present.
If that's the extent of your argument, then your argument is fairly meaningless. Everyone knows that slavery existed in the South. What I and others object to is the claim that the US became wealthy because of slavery. It seems much more likely to me that the US was economically held back by slavery.
Slave ownership was strongly concentrated. A relatively small class of plantation owners got rich off slavery. They didn't redistribute the proceeds across the entire white population. Economically, the slave-owning South, as a whole, lagged far behind the North, and slavery is a likely cause for that economic backwardness.
> didn't encode a right to vote (for anyone, that was left up to the individual states) until reconstruction.
That has nothing to do with slavery. The Constitution was written at a time when democracy was viewed with suspicion, and moreover. Nevertheless, the United States was, at the time, rapidly becoming one of the most democratic polities in the world. One way to see this is to look at the state constitutions written in this era.