BTW, does anyone know whether many of the Ft. Sumter soldiers were Southerners? Just curious.
And, what is the connection between the name of the city in S.C. “Sumter”, and the fort?
General Thomas Sumter, hero of the American Revolution
I think if the South refused to raise arms against the North, they would be an independent nation today.
Scotland is not going to attack any British bases. The matter would have to be negotiated to form new treaties and to get compensation for allowing the Brits to stay in their military bases. 99 year lease, perhaps.
If South Carolina had taken that approach with the Yankees, they might be an independent part of the Confederacy today?
Why does industrialization make slavery uneconomical? Wouldn’t a factory that pays its workers nothing but food and shelter be more profitable than one that pays workers enough for them to secure the same for themselves plus whatever extra they need to pay to keep the workers working for them?
If you read Ullyses S. Grant’s biography he felt the secession was illegal because many of those states were in territory bought and paid for by the US. So in effect it was stealing federal property.
I believe the theory is that, in an industrial setting, fear of unemployment is a better motivator than fear of the lash.
Imagine you’re a northern textile magnate. You and your fat cat fellow industrialists believe that fostering domestic industry is what will allow America to compete with the European powers and become strong. But it’s tough to grow when you have to compete with the established British textile industry, which is lavishly supplied with cotton grown in America. To northern industrialists, that must have seemed like rank disloyalty on the part of the southern aristocracy. They were all fellow Americans, weren’t they? Shouldn’t they be working together to strengthen the nation, rather than enriching their main international rival?
Would you really want a large workforce of unjustly oppressed laborers, wearing the scars of your whips on their backs, chained to your extremely expensive equipment?
It’s not impossible to implement a slave factory system. Laborers in Stalinist Russia worked their asses off for almost nothing. The gulags were waiting to swallow all shirkers. But that system required an entire society geared for brutal oppression. Not very economical. Obviously it’s a lot nicer to do away with that nonsense, but it’s also plain more efficient to have only those people who choose to be there, and to show any individual malingerer the door rather than to whip them, or send them to Siberia, or whatever other punishment a slave society can think up.
Obviously there’s been plenty of tension in the past between workers and owners. Their interests are not perfectly aligned. But slavery is a whole different universe. Actual paid workers genuinely do want their firm to be successful, and the owners genuinely want workers who aren’t so overwhelmed with resentment that they burn the place down. The best workforce is one that willingly shows up because they’re looking for a better opportunity than they had before, lured by a higher wage than they could receive anywhere else. What’s economical isn’t just about a single factory in isolation. It’s about the sort of broader societal arrangement of human relationships that allow us to voluntarily seek our potential. When you think about it in those terms, it’s easy to see why freedom just works better.
While in Russia, the Russian guide told us as we cruised up the Moscow/St. Petersburg canal connecting to the Volga, that
Stalin decided the canal was necessary, and it was. He used a giant force of slave labor, such that the banks of the canal as it exists today are actually the grave mounds of the dead laborers, who were simply worked until they died, the supply of slave labor being relatively endless.
Vast public works jobs have generally required great numbers of cheap and expendable labor. You could easily make a list.
Slaves in the South, however, were usually valued so highly that most of an owner’s wealth was represented by the number of slaves possessed. Reasonable conditions and accommodations were good business.
Slaves could also be used in the North, if a slave gang was contracted by a Northerner to do a project or run an otherwise thankless job, such as the salt works of Southern Illinois.
The plentiful supply of European immigrants to the North served the same purpose.
today, we simply import the goods rather than have them produced by slave labor here at home – except for meat packers and vegetable growers, whose workers might as well be slaves, so little do they receive for their work.
Would you really want slaves in your house, taking care of your children? But that is what happened. I’d think that being executed for breaking the machinery would be incentive enough.
You think the workers in the Triangle Shirtwaist factory had a lot of concern about the success of the company? Hell we have owners who don’t seem to really care if the place burns down, like in Bangladesh.
Sure, at the global scale. For agriculture also. But at the local scale an owner might well decide that slavery works better for him. Labor reform in the US did not happen because factory owners suddenly figured out that not overworking their employees was beneficial.
I wonder if slaves dying from factory disasters would have had the same impact as young women dying.
What might have stopped industrial slavery would have been technological advances in manufacturing equipment, enough to make deliberately uneducated slaves incapable of running machines. However slavery would reduce the need for manufacturing technology. Even today the low price of labor in Asia makes it uneconomical to do the kind of factory automation projects you’d do in the US. The source for that is a paper from a major US electronics firm.
The way you respond to my sentence, one might well think you’re implying that the very same workers whipped to within an inch of their lives might have been brought into the house the next day for junior-master to doddle on their knees.
If it were possible for only the trusted house slave sorts to work inside the factory building, leaving the rest outside twiddling their thumbs, just as the less trusted on a plantation might not have even been allowed on the front porch without permission, then yes, protecting the baby equipment would be easier. But since slaves are human beings, not interchangeable parts, the dynamics are different if a large group is brought to work inside a single building. Unlike assigning important household duties to just a few known people who have proven their reliability, a factory can require multitudes. It will not necessarily be obvious who is to blame in a large vulnerable workspace if the gears suddenly screech to a stop, and the technicians subsequently find a cleverly thrown wrench in the delicate mechanisms where it ought not to be. Perhaps it might have been placed there the day before when no one was looking.
I thought this was quite straightforward and can hardly imagine any objection. If the entire lot of warm bodies is packed together in one place, you greatly increase the chances that someone in the extreme tail of the distribution is lured into joyful anonymous sabotage. The same would obviously be true if every single field worker were allowed into the kitchen, each hand with a chance to stir the soup right before the cruel master took his supper. But no. That did not happen.
And if you don’t know who did it? Do you execute the entire workforce?
Stalin had no qualms about such things, which is why Stalinism functioned. People really did work their asses off. But he had an entire country of victims at his disposal, so he didn’t mind starving tens of millions and sending masses more off to the gulags. The old South was countless mini-tyrannies dotting the landscape, not a centralized system of terror with an entire nation of resources. It’s just not the same.
Yes. Pretty obviously.
If you were to tell those workers the day before the fire that their workplace had gone bankrupt and they would have to sit at home without a paycheck until they found something else, would they be happy about that? Would they be delighted with the news? Or would they rather wish for a successful company, so that they had a job? They went into work every day because they saw it as their best available option. Doubtless they felt no particular loyalty to their sweatshop managers, but it’s quite demonstrable that they were sufficiently interested to show up, do their jobs as directed, and keep collecting their paychecks. They weren’t mindless machines. They were human beings who chose to walk into that building because every other option seemed less attractive.
It should be self-evident that nobody wants to be locked inside a burning building. No miner wants to get trapped in a cave in. No broadcast tower climber wants to plunge to their death. No fisher wants to set out to sea before the perfect storm. No employee in any industry wants to be murdered by a negligent boss. But all of us look at the options available to us, and we take what looks best. This often involves a roll of the dice. That doesn’t stop being true even when the dice are unfairly stacked against workers.
The people in the Triangle factory absolutely did want their business to be successful enough to pay them, and that conditional desire for a successful company continued right up until the day when they burned to death.
They obviously cared that the building collapsed. Lethal negligence like that is the result of ponderous stupidity, not total disinterest in the productive quality of the business.
Even if you ignore all criminal penalties, owners are going to be much more interested in earning profits than they are interested in crushing their workforce to death. There has probably been an exception or two to this in history, a few serial killer equivalents sitting on boards of directors, but that’s going to be a strange case. The owners of those factories in Bangladesh would rather have had a productive profitable building, rather than a pile of rubble. They were just too lazy and stupid and incompetent to ensure that state of affairs, and just as obviously, they deserve to be in jail for their crime.
If you were a literal believer in the rationality assumptions of mathematical economics, then I can understand how you could say that the owners don’t care if their place burns down. They didn’t take foreseeable action to avoid it. But I don’t personally believe that people are fully rational. We don’t take sufficient basic precautions against things we don’t want to happen, because we are often short-sighted idiots. This is again something I wouldn’t ordinarily expect any argument about.
I imagine this actually happened in the north, where slavery wasn’t just abolished overnight. I expect that some owners actually did try slave industrialization.
They weren’t able to compete. At this point, I think it should be easy to understand why.
Absolutely true.
Sooner or later, some cracker dumbass would have done something stupid, spurred on by the pretty rhetoric of slave-owning gentlemen that spoke of honor.
I guess the Nazis had another opinion on this issue. Would our rebel be sure that no one would rat him out? Would the factory owners make more in reduced labor costs than they would in sabotaged machines? That’s a simpler calculation than worrying about children. There would be factory revolts, just like there were slave uprisings, but I suspect the benefits would outweigh the costs. Especially of you chained the workers to the machines.
The South used good old private enterprise in its tyranny - backed by the state. It isn’t quite the same, since the gulag was at least as much for punishment as for profit, so I suspect conditions in the factories would be better than in the gulag. However, remember the situation in “The First Circle.”
You are giving reasons why pure market forces will not ensure a safe work environment. I totally agree. The other option for the workers was begging or starvation. The option for the slaves would have been torture or death.
I used this as an example of how people can tolerate intolerable conditions. Would factory slaves have reacted any differently? Especially since the odds would be higher. Look how few whistle blowers there are in the sweatshops which exist today.
Are you going to trust an owner who refuses to pay enough to keep the building from catching fire or burning down to optimize manufacturing processes? True that’s not disinterest - but they might do better with disinterest.
Where did I say this was their goal? The value they attach to a worker is pretty low. Slaveowners did not have the goal of killing slaves either - they were too valuable. But their value was a lot less than it would have been if they had been considered as fully human.
I fail to see anything in our history of unregulated manufacturing that would make slave operated factories infeasible.
Unless, that is, the cost of free labor who did not have to be fed and housed and guarded quite so stringently would have been less. That might have been possible. But the South was not close to the places where immigrant labor came.
I’m sure they cared - but their risk assessment left a bit to be desired. And we do know that people don’t assess low probability events very well. I suspect they considered the immediate threat of workers slipping away through unlocked fire doors - not to mention the very immediate threat of losing money by shutting the place down for repairs - higher than the remote threat of a fire. The guy in Bangladesh was politically powerful - I’m sure he was shocked that his allies abandoned him.
Possible, but I’ve never read of any examples. I think the slave population in the north was gone by the time of industrialization. There might be a few examples.
Slavery would only have ended thru a combination of moral pressure to end the practice, economic incentives, and mechanization.
Consider how life was aboard many ships until about the mid 1800’s when the new clipper designs used mechanical means and thus lowered the number of sailors needed.
Yep. They sure did. And if you think that was an economical system, then I’m going to laugh in your face. They got a decent war machine up and running, and did so by sacrificing everything else they had.
I’ve already said in both my previous posts that it’s possible for slave industrialization to exist. It just wouldn’t be very efficient. Now I say it a third time. Nazi Germany is a great example of how badly it works.
Well, there hasn’t been any country with “pure market forces”. There’s probably a very good reason for that. I don’t see how any society of normal human beings can run on pure market forces.
But markets such as actually exist have done a pretty good job in making workplaces safer. It didn’t take OSHA to decrease workplace fatalities. The trend was a long-standing one. This isn’t about the benevolence of owners. It’s about having richer workers with other viable options. (This is not to say regulation has had no effect. But I don’t see how anyone can seriously argue that safety regulation has ever been more important than richer workers.)
Considering the various reports of sabotage in Nazi factories, I’d say that there was probably a decent amount of sabotage in Nazi factories.
It’s difficult to say for certain how severe the problem was, since “sabotage” was a catch-all term the Nazis applied generally: loafing, working slowly, being too fatigued on the job. All of this was called sabotage, and it was a capital offense. There were many executions.
Yet there was still genuine sabotage. People did what little they could to undermine their oppressors. These little things add up. If the Confederates had refrained from starting the war by firing on Fort Sumter, then it’s very likely the secession would have succeeded. Eventually the slave country would have industrialized, and they would have likewise found that free labor worked better in such an environment. Slave factories are possible, but not as economical, for all the reasons I’ve laid out. I shudder to think what they might have done, given an increasingly unnecessary and undesired slave workforce. There’s historical precedent for an industrial power using its lethal machination against a racial “sub-caste”.
Free people choose the best option available to them.
They want their business to succeed, at least to the extent that it continues paying them. That’s not blind loyalty, it’s just the pragmatism of people trying to make the best of what they have. There’s a corollary to that. If we take away their best option available, then we cause active harm to them. There’s a delicate balance here that I have to say most people don’t seem to appreciate.
Of course I wouldn’t trust the owner. But hell, I’m rich. I have the luxury of not trusting the owner.
Poor people have crueler gambles in front of them. I’m not saying that’s right or fair or that we shouldn’t try to do anything about it. I’m just saying that’s the way it is. The acknowledgement of reality is not an endorsement of the status quo.
And it’s hard to see how owners would ever do better with disinterest, at least in the real world where there are appropriate criminal penalties for murderous neglect. That’s true even in Bangladesh. My hypothetical was to show that there was other causes for them to care, in addition to the necessary criminal penalties.
I didn’t say you said that was their goal.
If I ever meet anyone who says slave operated factories are infeasible, I’ll pass along your message.
In the meantime, though, I’ll stand by the answer I gave Frylock. This was his question:
I’ve been explaining why industrialization makes slavery uneconomical.
Not impossible. Not infeasible. Uneconomical. Even the omnipresent threat of summary execution doesn’t totally dissuade those tiny little wrenches being thrown into the gears of the machine. That’s just plain historical fact. Slavery had a certain obscenely profitable niche, and it oozed into place wherever it worked. That niche is past. In modern industrial contexts, it just isn’t very efficient. Freedom works better.
There’s a couple of problems with this theory.
First, textile makers represented only a fraction of northern business and other businesses had no reason to care who southern cotton growers were selling their product to.
Second, there was no effort made to restrict the export of cotton - the tariff was placed on the import of industrial goods. This essentially had no effect on cotton sales. If European textile production was reduced because of lowered exports to America then American textile production would have increased to fill the void - the net consumption of cotton would have remained steady.
The issue Southerners had with the tariff had nothing to do with sales. They were upset about their purchases. They wanted to be able to buy cheaper European industrial goods rather than the more expensive American industrial goods. They were seeking to put their own self-interests ahead of the national good. So if their claims were true and northern businessmen were doing the same, what right did they have to complain?
I’m not disagreeing with you here, but pointing out that there were industrial slaves in the antebellum south…apparently as of 1850, about 5% of slaves worked in industry. I’m pretty sure there have been studies done on the topic, that I unfortunately don’t have access to. There was a book by Robert Starobin, published in 1970, “Industrial Slavery in the Old South” that looks at the topic. It might be handy to take a look at it. I think he argued that industrial slavery was viable, but I don’t have his findings handy.
I just used textiles as an example. The point is that the southern plantation class was ambivalent on the issue of domestic industrial development, because they dealt in raw material.
Well, textiles isn’t a random representative example. Cotton was the main southern export so textile makers were the only northern business concerned about southern exports.
It’s worth remembering that the mid-west and the west were also primarily agricultural producers and faced the same economic situation the south did. But when the Civil War began the mid-west and the west sided with the industrial north not the agricultural south which belies the theory that this was an economic divide.