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Things were slightly different, however, in the United States. With the advent of King Cotton in the nineteenth century, the American level of productivity and profit increased, leading directly to the sectional conflict that would result in the Civil War. The dispute was economic and was based on the questions of efficiency and commercial relationships with the larger world. Many abolitionists joined those who believed that wage labor was a more efficient form of accumulation.

[[File:Gordon,_scourged_back,_colored_slide_2.png|thumbnail|left|300px|Colored glass slide from the medical examination by Union doctor in 1863 of Gordon, a slave, in Baton Rouge]]

There were numerous uprisings of the enslaved in the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries across the landscape of the New World. Enslaved Africans never accepted the fact of their enslavement. Neither did they accept the fact that they were chattel. The maintenance of the slave economies that produced the rice, sugar, coffee, tobacco, and cotton so necessary to Western Europe, was a violent affair.