The U.S. certainly didn't develop by undercutting China with cheap labor.
The point of US civil war was that the industrialized North wanted to rid of slavery and the agricultural South wanted to go on with slave-dependent growing of cotton etc.
Likewise, places where formal abolition of slavery was more recent (e.g. Kingdom of SA and Yemen until 1962, Oman until 1970, etc) are hardly industrial nations.
(Yes, this is not the complete picture and things are not straightforward or simple: compare to slave labor in Nazi Germany and Soviet Russia, etc, where some of it was used in industrial-type activities, and even R&D, as described by Solzhenitsyn in In The First Circle; however, you could describe these as solutions for war-time economy, and not sustainable.)
And also, I see that argument and my take away is that the solution to our economic woes is to sabotage the industrial sector of places like China.
Liberal immigration policy and real opportunity (because of the previous) lead to an influx of people probably above average in their motivation / skills which probably helped a lot too. I wish we'd remember this lesson today...
I'm not trying to discount American culture / ideals. I love living in San Francisco because of this - most of the good of American culture without many of the downsides.