Strawman. Never made that argument in this thread.
And the people I showed in the videos were sharecroppers, not slaves (as in body owned by another). You don't know how to differentiate the two so you have no need of lecturing about anything in this thread.
Oh the martyrs!
The torture based economy of the USA--as this historian and author calls it--fueled the US economy and the industrial north. So, no, the money made from slavery did not just sit in the hands or under the beds of aristocratic Southern slave owners. Nor did the cotton picked merely stay in the towns of the South.
The American West was not driving cotton crops that were being sold all over Europe.
As I said in my
earlier posts in this thread the United States industrialized. Did you read my post about the lecture and graph in my Developmental Economics course and how industrial countries economies grew exponentially? Only and handful of countries on earth embraced industrialization. Latin America essentially did not. Albeit, the City of Sao Paulo was a very industrialized city in the late 1800s but it was more an exception. Agrarian societies like Latin America sold their raw resources (not finished goods) to industrial countries who turned those raw goods into finished products. Industrial societies like the USA could take its raw resources and turn them into finished products and export them overseas, adding value as economists would say, to those raw materials.
But slavery itself did not only benefit a Southern aristocracy. That's not even how the so-called "circular flow" of an economy works. The material and money produced in the South added to the United States GDP.
The United States did not simply "leave" slavery behind. Brazil you might say did because Brazil never fought a Civil War to end slavery.
Slavery was in fact a moral issue for many in the United States. Like most German-Americans in Wisconsin who almost all where abolitionist. Those sympathies that is. Or what... the North fought the war against the South so that it could mechanize the Southern slave crops and pay white field workers a middle-class wage in the late 1880s?
Wait... what the hell does any of that have to do with picking cotton and tobacco and rice? Black-American slaves were mainly employee in steel and shipping? The US Civil War was fought to free black slaves toiling in steel production and working in the ports and on ships, that's what the US Civil War was fought over?
Riddle me how my Black-American grandfather was toiling in poverty in Mississippi as a sharecropper--before he came up North to Milwaukee and worked in the factories--if the North came to bring blessed productivity to Southern agricultural fields by paying black labor so damn much money to work?
Like this woman... who was a sharecropper: