Throughout 2026, the United States plans to commemorate and celebrate the 250th anniversary of the signing of the Declaration of Independence. The opening stanza to that founding document:

“We hold these truths to be self-evident, that all men are created equal, that they are endowed, by their creator, with certain inalienable rights.”

Yet, at the time of the Declaration’s signing, there were 500,000 enslaved Black people in the United States. Their rights were not included in that document. The founders denied every liberty and every justice to one-fifth of the population. Many of America’s founders understood that human chattel slavery was wrong. That didn’t dissuade them from purchasing kidnapped African people, insuring their “investments,” and creating a pipeline of free labor by breeding and enslaving generations.

As with any capitalist enterprise, the domestic slave trading industry required growth to survive while managing what we would call today, “supply chain costs.” So one hundred years later, there were 4 million enslaved because it was more profitable to forcibly breed people domestically than continue to incur the expense of shipping people from Africa.

Slave labor was the foundation of the economic model that transformed 13 colonies into an economic global giant we know today as the United States of America.

All of the components that constitute a business model today were in place during the formation of capitalism in the United States. Let’s see how they have played out over the last two-and-a-half centuries. Don’t panic. This isn’t a comprehensive history lesson. We are simply going to deconstruct a successful 250-year business model.

Component #1: Products & Services

Sugar? Tobacco? Cotton? We’ve chosen just one product line in the business of slavery: Cotton. 

What made cotton so desirable? In the 1790s America’s oldest crops, like tobacco, were depleting farmland and dropping in value. At the same time, the textile industry in Great Britain was exploding, creating enormous international demand for cotton clothing. The prominence of cotton existed from the end of the 18^th century to the mid 19^th century (the beginning of the civil war in 1861). During this period it was a business that continuously evolved to maximize profits. Cotton was a product line that would clothe the world, fuel global industrialization, and put the United States in the position of being one of the leading economies in the world.

Cotton remained central to the American economy for a very long time because of the sharecropping system that replaced slavery and continued to be the leading American export from 1803 to 1937. 

Today we know that people (labor costs) make-up a company’s largest expense, upwards of 70% of its budget. Now, go back in time. Imagine producing a product that’s in great demand without any labor costs.

It’s called slavery.

In US schools we are taught much about the Industrial Revolution, which speaks to the innovations of a White man named Eli Whitney. What we were not taught is that Eli Whitney’s invention of the cotton gin, which easily separated cotton fiber from its seeds, was merely a motor for a global economic machine. The institution of slavery was its fuel.

Component #2: Expenses

Day-to-day operating expenses. Capital expenditures or long-term asset purchases. Fixed and variable costs. No matter the size of your business you must track and control your expenses. Take a look at the expense report of the slave trader, William James Smith, as he bought and sold men, women and children on his business trips:

This is just one page among scores in his ledger. Over a ten-year period, between 1844 and 1854, Smith took business trips to major slave markets such as Charleston, South Carolina, and Richmond, Virginia, to purchase Africans and then sell those human beings as enslaved labor in other markets for a profit. 

Notice, these “expenses” did not have last names. Why? Because the institution of slavery was designed to erase people’s identity, treating them as property to be bought, sold, traded, bred, and insured, rather than treat them as human beings. 

Component #3: Sales and Marketing

Digital marketing. Multi-channel sales. Customer experience. These are buzzwords today that the founders would find unimaginable. Instead, slave traders relied on direct-to-consumer sales, sometimes employing a middleman.

The Old Slave Mart is a building located at 6 Chalmers Street in Charleston, South Carolina, that once housed an Antebellum-period slave auction gallery. Constructed in 1859, the building is believed to be the last existing slave auction facility in South Carolina. In 1975, the Old Slave Mart was added to the National Register of Historic Places for its role in Charleston’s African American history. Today, the building houses the Old Slave Mart Museum.

Here businessmen sold enslaved people six days a week. Everyone from newborns to 70-year-olds were sold at the Slave Mart.

No matter where enslaved people were sold, be it in South Carolina, New York (yes, New York), or Atlanta as in the photo above, there was work to be done before going public. To make the most money for the traders and the sellers, enslaved people had to be prepped before they appeared on the auction block. Prep could be everything from high fat and high protein diets to get them into better physical shape, to fresh clothing. When enslaved people were nearing what we would call “retirement” today, sellers would dye their hair or pluck out any grays. Prepping for the marketplace also included enslavers oiling the skin to make their commodity look shiny new.

By the time the auction block opened for the day, sellers and traders were ready to garner the largest sum of money.

Component #4: Advertising

While newspaper advertising has largely been replaced by digital advertising, it was the primary means of mass communication 250 years ago. Ads placed by slave traders (a/k/a businessmen) appeared in local and regional newspapers announcing upcoming slave auctions. Ads were also placed by slave owners for their missing “property.” Enslaved people ran away from bondage so often that some 200,000 “runaway slave” ads appeared in newspapers across the country in the decades before slavery ended following the Civil War.

One of these slave owners was George Washington, who, while still in office as president, conducted one of the era’s most well-documented hunts for Ona Judge, an enslaved woman who self-emancipated from the presidential mansion in 1796.

Component #5: Financial Services (Banking  & Insurance)

Businesses rely on banks for all sorts of financial needs: Lines of credit, mortgages, etc.  Plantation owners and overseers did the same. They managed the financing of the cotton empire through relationships with a network of bankers and accountants. They took out lines of credit and mortgages. This was an export-driven economy tied to banks in the north United States and overseas.

Banks based in New York, such as Citizens Bank and Canal Bank—which later became part of JP Morgan Chase—accepted enslaved people as collateral on loans and “collected” 1,250 Black people when plantation owners defaulted. We could cite dozens of examples, but remember, this isn’t a history lesson. Rather, a deconstruction of a successful 250-year-old business model.

As we’ve mentioned earlier, enslaved people were considered property. So, they were insured. Not life insurance for the families of enslaved people who were violently killed or died of natural causes, but property insurance for the enslavers. New York Life Insurance Company and Aetna, Inc., which are the country’s largest life and health insurance companies today, sold policies that reimbursed slave owners for financial losses. Of course the insurance companies profited, too. 

Component #6: Expansion

Today, most business schools have renamed “expansion” to “sustainable growth.” After the signing of the Declaration but before the Civil War, the business strategy for expansion was acquisition, as it is today. Only the acquisition wasn’t a competitor, market penetration, or adjacent business.

It was land.

This acquisition strategy was called the Indian Removal Act of 1830. The Act forcibly relocated tens of thousands of Indigenous people from their homelands east of the Mississippi. Their removal gave 25 million acres of land to White settlers and plantation owners.

While some American middle and high-schoolers learn about the Indian Removal Act and the Trail of Tears, you’d be hard-pressed to find students who have learned about the countless land mass that has been stolen from Black Americans over the last one hundred years.

In 2019, The Atlantic produced a documentary called “The Great Land Robbery: How Black Americans Were Robbed of Their Land.” This mass land dispossession—a war waged by deed of title, which has affected 98 percent of Black farmers—can only be called theft, says The Atlantic’s Senior Editor, Vann R. Newkirk II, in the documentary. 

The transcript from the documentary trailer, “The Great Land Robbery: How Black Americans Were Robbed of Their Land,” tells us that: “The land was wrested first from Native Americans, by force. It was then cleared, watered, and made productive for intensive agriculture by the labor of enslaved Africans, who after Emancipation would come to own a portion of it. Later, through a variety of means—sometimes legal, often coercive, in many cases legal and coercive, occasionally violent—farmland owned by Black people came into the hands of White people. It was aggregated into larger holdings, then aggregated again, eventually attracting the interest of Wall Street.”

Racial Inequality is Big Business

One of the myths told about US Slavery is that it was an archaic practice that only enriched a small number of men. In reality, slavery was big business. Slavery powered the United States’ transformation from a colonial economy to the second biggest industrial power in the world. That is the intentionality that John Oliver speaks of in the earlier quote. 

Successful, long-term businesses exist not by accident but through strategic excellence and execution. That is especially true of those that sustain themselves over centuries. And wealth distributed among a small group in the United States is a direct outcome of that business model that evolved into a codified system of racial apartheid known as “Jim Crow” that lasted for nearly 100 years from 1865 (abolishment of slavery) to the passing of the Civil Rights act of 1964, which is being challenged today.

Why? 

Because that challenge will ensure that wealth continues to flow into the coffers of all those who have for generations benefited directly or indirectly – banking, insurance, real estate, colleges and universities, healthcare, politics, agriculture, transportation, government and more – and still do today.

Reflection

• What do you now know that you didn’t know before you read this blog?
• Mark Twain once noted, “History doesn’t repeat itself, but it often rhymes.” Think about what’s happening in the U.S. today. What examples do you see of history repeating itself or rhyming? What past errors have we failed to learn from?
• If you live in the United States, what is one action you will take in 2026 to learn a fuller history of the country?