Slavery Purchased America's Freedom: While the white Americans profit from slave trade, they actually benefited from the slave system to fund the war against England. As one historian put it, Americans actually purchased their freedom with products grown by slaves and then traded to the French during the War of Independence. Before the war, agricultural products such as rice, indigo, and tobacco all produced by enslaved Africans were America's most valuable exports. Without the slave trade and slavery, America would never have been able to generate the wealth to gain its freedom from England, at least in the 1700s. As a member of the British Parliament acknowledged after the war. I know not why we should blush to confess slavery was an essential ingredient of American Independence.
