By Bao and Aayush. Scroll down to continue.
At the time, slaves made up 20% of the colonies’ population. These slaves were a form of free labor for a better economy because the owners didn’t have to pay wages and make the slaves work for hours with poor conditions. This connects to the theme because in agriculture economies crops like tobacco and cotton were grown by the slaves labor, which then would be traded for money. This made the owners filthy rich.
This act was where Thomas Jefferson, James Monroe, and Andrew Jackson wanted to remove the Indians and expand their land. They did this by pressuring the Cherokee to sign the Treaty of New Echota in 1835. The treaty that they signed resulted in thousands of Indians being forced out of their land where they had to walk for 3 months with chains and no food. In the end, 20,000 (60,000 all tribes) of them died in the harsh conditions. This connects to the theme because they wanted the land that the Native was living in to expand more land and grow more crops because of the rich fertile soil . The Americans were eager to get more land so they could grow cotton, tobacco, and much more to sell them and get money from it.
A previously closed debate was re-opened by South Carolina Senator Robert Hayne and Massecheustus Senator Daniel Webster, both who owned slaves, about nullification theory. They claimed a state didn’t have to follow a federal law if a state deemed it unconstitutional, and claimed that states reserved the right to secede from the union at any time. The idea that states could secede was ultimately tied to slavery, and thus profit. As America was growing increasingly divided, the South’s economic backbone of slavery was continuously facing scrutiny from the North and other global powers. As a result, the South realized that secession could be their best chance of keeping their slaves. This is clearly ignoring a whole culture and population, as the slaves had no choice in this decision and were kept in line using violence and borderline/literal torture. Thus, South Carolina threatening secession can be seen as ignoring the wishes of Black Americans in order to pursue their own financial well-being, putting on display the lengths American citizens were able to go in order to earn money.
Sharecropping is another form of saying “slavery”. After the Civil War, the South couldn't depend on slavery anymore so sharecropping gave landlords another way to take advantage of colored laborers. The colored people were restricted from their social and economic mobility because they were chained to the land they work. This connects to the theme because sharecropping was a type of economic rule that shackled many African Americans to the whims of their landowners. Unlike those salaried workers, sharecroppers' pay was determined by the sale of crops and landowner which was really biased against them. Since this guaranteed money for the landowners, it assured a consistent crop supply for the landowner, even if crop yields changed from year to year.
In the early 1800s, industrialization touched every industry. However, an emerging mentality as a result of this was to increase profit in any way possible. This was epitomized in the meatpacking industry. Workers were paid literal cents on the hour for 12-16 hour workdays. Sanitation was very poor, and rats in the same facility as the food was very common. Additionally, children worked these lines, for the same hours. Meat on the floor would be picked up and put back in a batch. Meat was “reused” - grinded up and reformed into something else. This is a prime example of putting profit above anything else - the laborers & the consumers. They didn’t care what went out to the consumers, as long as they would pay for it - evidenced by the fact that often, meat quality was very poor and sanitation was even worse. The workers in said factories were easily replaceable and the factory owners knew it - they were overworked to exhaustion. The harsh reality was that these businessmen didn’t really care about ethics, sanitation, or morals - all they wanted was profit, again revealing how ruthless businessmen were (and are) for money.
American businessmen saw Hawaii as an open market to expand into, and started selling industrial goods Hawaiians had never seen before. They leveraged the novelty of their items to obtain as much sandalwood as possible, completely ignoring the long hours commoners worked in order to get them as well as the population decline of sandalwood on the island. The natives were “almost angry at themselves for having formerly sold their hogs, vegetables, etc. for such trifling articles”. The American businessmen understood sandalwood supply was low, and despite that, pushed for more, leading to sandalwood being endangered and commoners working longer hours to obtain these trees. This shows that businessmen truly didn’t care about others, as they gladly exploited Hawaii’s labor and resources in order to turn a profit. In fact, an American merchant argued “The islanders ought to be cutting sandalwood, not praying and learning”. Businessmen saw it better for them to harvest sandalwood than to develop Hawaii, displaying how they were determined to completely drain Hawaii’s resources without giving much in return.