This country was built on slave labor.
This is from March, 2007: A student wrote: I am not sure what you mean by "this country was built on slave labor." Are you telling me that this country would not have existed had it not been for slaves? I do not know where you are getting your information. I replied: To say that this country was built on slave labor is NOT to say that without slave labor this country would not have existed. (Although that might well be true.) To say that you got to work on the bus this morning is not to say that, had there been no buses, you would not have gotten to work. (Drive your car; take a cab; bike; walk; carpool; hitch-hike.) However, it is in fact highly probable that, had it not been for the availability of slave labor, this country would neither have quite started nor developed as it did . (It probably would have been built very differently. And be very different now.) To an important extent, the development of the industrial North was