The Many Devastating Effects of Slavery – Part 2
How slavery impoverished the South generally, and Africa.
The false narrative of the New York Times’ 1619 Project includes the claim that “In order to understand the brutality of American capitalism, you have to start on the [slave] planation.” But slavery in America wasn’t a capitalist or free market regime in any way. As explained by Allen Guelzo:
The clinching refutation of the slavery-is-capitalism theory comes from the mouths of the slave owners themselves. They would have been aghast at the idea they were presiding over Yankee capitalism. Capitalism, complained slavery’s paladin, John C. Calhoun, “operated as one among the efficient causes of that great inequality of property which prevails in most European countries. No system can be more efficient to rear up a moneyed aristocracy. Its tendency is, to make the poor poorer, and the rich richer.” The 1619 Project imagines Southern slaveholders were practicing “capitalism” simply because they made money. But slavery had been around since antiquity—long before anything resembling capitalism existed. And what the South saw in its plantations wasn’t capitalism but the opposite. Writing in 1854, the pro-slavery propagandist George Fitzhugh described slavery as “a beautiful example of communism, where each one receives not according to his labor, but according to his wants.”
As Sowell writes in The Economics and Politics of Race, the vestiges of slavery include its adverse impact on self-reliance, productivity, and economic incentives generally:
Most whites in the United States did not own slaves and even those who did seldom had the number of slaves or the kind of affluence depicted in such fictional works as “Gone with The Wind.” In 1790, nearly one-fourth of all free American families owned slaves, but by 1850, that was down to ten percent … As in South Africa, the masses of ill-educated, poorly skilled whites were the most vehement and violent in their assertions of white superiority. And like South Africa, Brazil, and other slave societies, the American South developed among its free white population an aversion and disdain for hard work, which was associated with slaves. The South was and has remained the poorest region of the United States, its white population being perennially poorer than other white Americans, and especially so in those states in the Deep South where slaves were concentrated. DeToqueville noted in the 1830’s that although white Americans in the South had the same racial and cultural background as those who settled other regions of the country, the colonies in which there were no slaves became more populous and more prosperous than those in which slavery flourished. Sailing down the Ohio River between the slave state of Kentucky and the free state of Ohio with similar climate and soil, deTocqueville found the white population ignorant and apathetic on the one side and full of activity and intelligence on the other, with the land of the slave state being visibly less cultivated than that of the free state.
Slavery made profits for slaveholders, of course, but a reliance on human slavery also made the American South much poorer than the North, and less industrialized, rendering the South less capable of producing enough of the sorts of things necessary to win wars, including the Civil War. As explained by Benjamin Arrington:
As both the North and the South mobilized for [civil] war, the relative strengths and weaknesses of the “free market” and the “slave labor” economic systems became increasingly clear - particularly in their ability to support and sustain a war economy. The Union's industrial and economic capacity soared during the war as the North continued its rapid industrialization to suppress the rebellion. In the South, a smaller industrial base, fewer rail lines, and an agricultural economy based upon slave labor made mobilization of resources more difficult. As the war dragged on, the Union's advantages in factories, railroads, and manpower put the Confederacy at a great disadvantage.
The South’s reliance on slave labor rather than work done by technology and machines much reduced the South’s prosperity and productivity. As Thomas Sowell describes in his book Wealth, Poverty, and Politics:
The prevalence of such attitudes is another cultural handicap for any group or nation, especially those currently lagging economically. Sometimes the problem is not just an aversion to work, or to certain kinds of work, but also a lack of drive for progress. Here again, America’s antebellum South was an example: Techniques of Southern agriculture changed slowly, or not at all. So elementary a machine as the plow was adopted only gradually and only in scattered places; as late as 1856, many small farmers in South Carolina were still using the crude colonial hoe. There was little change in the cotton gin, gin house, or baling screw between 1820 and the Civil War. The cotton gin, a crucial factor in the economy of the antebellum South, was invented by a Northerner. When it came to inventions in general, only 8 percent of the U.S. patents issued in 1851 went to residents of the Southern states, whose white population was approximately one-third of the white population of the country. Even in agriculture, the main economic activity of the region, only 9 out of 62 patents for agricultural implements went to Southerners. The lesser dedication of Southerners to economic activity, and a corresponding lesser investment in their own human capital, was also reflected in lower levels of skills in the South, both among labor and management.
As Nobel Prize winning economist Robert William Fogel writes in his book Without Consent or Contract: The Rise and Fall of American Slavery (p. 103), “The process of industrialization began in the South at about the same time as it began in the North, but proceeded at a slower rate. Between 1820 and 1860 the southern workers engaged in manufacturing increased by 72 percent, but the northern increase was 383 percent.”
Also, As Eric Herschthal writes in “The Science of Abolition: How Slaveholders Became the Enemies of Progress”:
Black abolitionists helped cement the image of slavery as scientifically backward. In Frederick Douglass’s final memoir, published in 1881, he depicted the technological sophistication of New Bedford, Massachusetts, the city to which he escaped in 1838, as the mirror opposite of the slave-dependent, technology-starved South. Speaking of New Bedford, he wrote, “Here were sinks, drains, self-shutting gates, washing-machines, wringing-machines, and a hundred other contrivances for saving time and money.” He concluded, “In a word, I found everything managed with much more scrupulous regard to economy ... than in the country from which I had come.” Commenting on his return to his former owner’s plantation in 1881, he marveled at how the labor that was once completed by sixty enslaved people was now “by the aid of machinery ... accomplished by ten men.”
The greater economic prosperity enjoyed by the non-slave North led to larger increases in population than in the less economically-developed South, a population advantage that also contributed to the North’s edge during the Civil War. The Constitution allowed the counting of three-fifths of each slave toward additional representation for the South in the House of Representatives. But as Sean Wilenz writes in No Property in Man:
The bonus given by the three-fifths clause, which southerners had supposed would secure them a majority in the House and the Electoral College, had long since failed to keep pace with a relative rise in northern population, and the disparity kept getting worse. In 1820, the non-slaveholding states (including those that had commenced emancipation) held 123 seats in the House, compared to 90 held by the slave states; in 1850, the respective figures were 147 and 90. In 1856, the Electoral College favored the non-slave states by a margin of 176 to 120.
The dynamic of increased reliance on cheap labor leading to reduced productivity innovation continues to this day. As the Wall Street Journal has reported, “To some economists … dependence on imported workers is approaching unhealthy levels in some places, stifling productivity growth and helping businesses delay the search for more sustainable solutions to labor shortages. Those solutions could include bigger investments in automation … “
Just as slavery devastated the economy of the American South, Africans’ involvement in the slave trade devastated Africa’s economy. Economic historians have shown that, due to intense competition, African slave sales weren’t profitable for anyone involved in the trade, except perhaps the Africans who first captured them. But even then, the destabilization that followed from a universal fear of slave-taking by neighboring African tribes dramatically reduced both the well-being and productivity of Africans generally. Like the Aztecs, who submitted their victims to human sacrifice instead of membership in a wider tax-paying citizenry, African warlords depleted their own human resources in return for meager if any slave-trade profits.
Robert Paul Thomas and Richard Nelson Bean explore these issues in “The Fishers of Men: The Profits of the Slave Trade,” in The Journal of Economic History, Vol. 34, Issue 4 (December 1974) at pp. 885-914. In it, they write:
The slaves shipped to America as we have seen above were almost always acquired by Europeans by purchase from Africans. Africans sold to European slave traders were originally obtained in different ways, and these differences are important in understanding the impact of the Atlantic slave trade upon Africa. Some unfortunates sold themselves into slavery in times of great famine. These were a tiny fraction of those exported. A more significant but still small percentage were criminals, or persons with poor political judgment, who would otherwise have been exiled or executed by their own societies. Some were captives in wars that would have occurred in the absence of a slave trade and who would have been slain if there had been no commercial vent. Another category was made up of slaves sold to Europeans because their sale price was higher than the discounted present value of their services to their owner, but who would have been slaves in any case. The final group consisted of people enslaved by force (or slaves stolen by force) who would have been unaffected in the absence of the economic incentive provided by the Atlantic slave trade …
There is no doubt that many African societies held slaves both before and after the era of the Atlantic slave trade. The same conditions of abundant land and scarce labor that occurred in colonial America also existed in Africa, providing an economic incentive to own men …
The fishers of men were Africans who by force turned other Africans into slaves and started these unfortunates down the commercial pipeline which eventually deposited some of them in an American plantation. The techniques of capture varied to suit the occasion, but usually were directed at people outside of the immediate political unit or kinship grouping. Most slaves were the victims of violence taken in kidnappings, netted in raids, or swept up by large military operations. It is impossible to determine exactly what fraction of African wars were a result of the economic inducements of the slave trade [but] examples of warring for profit are legion …
The consequences of the slave trade for Africa were immense. The economic resources of Africa were unproductively diverted into slave raiding. We have seen that too many Africans were in this industry, causing the supply of slaves to be too large and correspondingly, the price of slaves to be too low. The difference between being a slave and being a slave owner was a matter of the upper hand. Therefore, many of the resources of Africa were devoted to defense. It was not in anyone’s interest to own any form of wealth that was not fairly easily protected. Imagine the consequences for a modern developed country if the inhabitants of the next town could at any moment sweep down and confiscate both your goods and your person … The unique characteristics of African society and culture are at least in part explained by the persistent pressure of the threat of violence and confiscation.
The economic devastation wrought in Africa by the slave trade was so notorious that some American abolitionists wanted to establish free labor colonies in Africa so Africans themselves could see just how counterproductive slavery was. As Eric Herschthal writes in “The Science of Abolition: How Slaveholders Became the Enemies of Progress”:
For more than a decade, antislavery advocates in Britain and America had been floating the idea of establishing a free-labor colony in West Africa, worked by paid indigenous laborers and overseen by white officials, in the hopes that it would prove free-labor colonies in Africa could be more humane and more profitable than slave plantations in the Americas … In addition to proving that free Black labor could outperform enslaved labor, abolitionists argued, Sierra Leone’s commercial success would undermine the African slave trade by encouraging indigenous Africans to trade in “legitimate” goods rather than enslaved people … During the 1770s and early 1780s, explorers who traveled to Africa, regardless of their views on slavery, tended to discuss racial differences between Africans and Europeans in terms of culture, religion, and politics—in a word, character, not color … By the 1790s slavery’s defenders increasingly argued that Africans’ barbarity, their “violent spirit of revenge,” doomed any attempt to impose “civilized” government on them. [Carl] Wadström [an English antislavery naturalist] countered that the political instability and violence sometimes witnessed in Africa arose from the slave trade itself. Indeed, the entire “state of anarchy and blood” that Wadström claimed characterized African societies stemmed from the pressure certain African groups felt to procure enslaved laborers for European slave traders.
I began the previous essay with a quote from Nikole Hannah Jones, creator of the 1619 Project, who wrote an article in the New York Times Magazine entitled “What Is Owed” stating her framing of American history demands that certain national policies be enacted, and “[a]t the center of those policies must be reparations.” While a government check is simple, the history of slavery is complicated, especially as the prime movers of the African slave trade were Africans themselves. Slavery was a horrifically evil institution. It also didn’t benefit many people beyond the original enslavers in Africa and, in America, the relatively few plantation families in the South. In the big picture, slavery not only deprived slaves of their liberty; it dramatically depressed the incomes of the large majority of Southern workers, and left many of them working the most dangerous jobs – because slave-owning employers didn’t have to pay free workers for their on-the-job injuries, whereas if their own slaves were seriously injured, they’d lose the entire value of the slave. Not surprisingly, a system as grotesquely unjust as slavery had many, many victims.
In the next essay, I’ll explore how, just as competition from slaves drove down the wages of other free whites, today’s competition from illegal immigrants (who must often accept very low wages) drive down the wages of American citizens.