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In actual fact, however, in the years before the Civil War, there was no capitalism without slavery. The two were, in many ways, one and the same. At the end of the 18th century, slavery in the United States was a declining institution.... Wage labor was increasingly replacing slave labor in both the urban and the rural areas of the upper South. And then came cotton.... By the end of the 1830s, the Seminole, the Creek, the Chickasaw, the Choctaw and the Cherokee had all been "removed" to lands west of the Mississippi. Their expropriated land provided the foundation of the leading sector of the global economy in the first half of the 19th century.... Between 1820 and 1860 more than a million enslaved people were transported from the upper to the lower South, the vast majority by the venture-capitalist slave traders the slaves called "soul drivers." ...It is not simply that the labor of enslaved people underwrote 19th-century capitalism. Enslaved people were the capital: four million people worth at least $3 billion in 1860, which was more than all the capital invested in railroads and factories in the United States combined. Seen in this light, the conventional distinction between slavery and capitalism fades into meaninglessness.