re economic value of slaves–calculating what it cost to buy a slave omits the economic benefits of slavery, ie what value accrues from their bondage, so a slave that cost $400 to buy may generate say $8000 from their labor, so total buyout would have to be more than $2.7 billion
A slave that initially cost four hundred dollars would also need food, clothing, and shelter for the rest of his or her life. So subtract those expenses from the value of their labor.
If the average slave cost a hundred dollars a year in upkeep and lived forty years, then half of the eight thousand dollars they generated was self-consumed.
Link to the column:
Could we have saved money by buying out slave owners rather than fighting the Civil War?
No. That’s like saying you can’t buy a truck for less than the value of the work you can do with the truck. That’s not how it works with trucks, and it never worked that way with slaves either.
Compensated emancipation (paying slave owners the market value, and freeing the slaves) was done in several countries in the Americas, and in colonial possessions of certain European empires, and indeed in the District of Columbia. It worked pretty well, and–bonus–did not require the riving of nations, massive bloodshed, and generations of resentments.
You say that as if the only objection southern slaveholders had to abolition was that they wouldn’t get paid for their slaves.
The price of anything is determined by what a willing buyer and seller agree on as the price.
I doubt the US Government and the slave owners would agree on the price. Especially once the slave owners figured out all the slaves are being bought out, fi the government did it secretly.
That is unless the government uses eminent domain. Then if so you’re right back to a Civil War.
Again, it worked very well in many other countries. And no war.
Right, an economic solution only works if it’s an economic problem to begin with. It wasn’t. If the plantation owners just wanted to maximize the profit they got from their plantations, they’d have hired free workers at market rates. They didn’t. Slavery wasn’t about profit; it was about getting to boss people around and feeling superior to others and getting away with rape and murder.
That depends on the crop. The traditional plantation crops, tobacco, cotton, indigo, and sugarcane, require a tiny number of educated managers, and a huge number of unskilled laborers. Under those conditions, slave labor can be far more profitable than free labor. You will notice that, in the US, the abolition movement took off mainly in states where cotton and tobacco don’t grow well.
Even after emancipation, the economics of the plantation crops still favor the large landowner over the small farmer. Caribbean islands with sugarcane-based economies still have abysmal human-rights records, regardless of whether the laborers are slave or free. Typically, formal slavery was replaced by informal peonage. (In the US, it was called “sharecropping”.) It was not until the 1940s, when mechanical tractors and harvesters replaced much of the hand labor, that sharecropping died out.
Just because the laborers were unskilled doesn’t mean that slavery was economical. Even at unskilled labor, a free man will still work more efficiently than a slave.
It worked very well for the slave-owners (the calculation I’ve seen for the British Empire was that they received the equivalent of £20 billion in today’s money - and that’s not including the value of the “non-domiciled” tax concession, which still applies and was largely invented for people who owned land in the colonies).
Not so sure if the slaves thought it worked that well for them.
Sorry for the slight hijack: I thought most slaves got a small parcel of land they had to farm in their free time for their food. I suppose they also had to build and maintain their own shelters. Can anyone confirm?
Well, they were freed from slavery, probably at least a generation earlier than otherwise. Their post-slavery rights may not have been ideally protected, but freedmen didn’t have it so good in the United States either.
Could we have saved money by buying out slave owners rather than fighting the Civil War?
The answer would be a solid no. No matter what the U.S. government would offer, the South was not going to give up what they thought of as their cultural life style. Slavery was the basis of their economy, and they didn’t want that to change. You might as well ask if the gun issue could be solved by the government offering to buy up all those excess guns.
Even worse, slavery was a dying institution. In the 18th century, slavery was wide spread. Every country and every one of the thirteen colonies had slaves. By the time of the Civil War, slavery was illegal in almost all countries and in over 1/2 of the United States. (I think only Cuba and Brazil still allowed slavery). To the Southern plantation owners, this was an attack on their lifestyle.
When the U.S. was first independent, the South was the main economic engine driving development. It was slave harvested Southern cotton that allowed the U.S. to grow and function. Virginia was not only the richest state, it was the politically most powerful. It was the Virginia elite who gave the political leadership to the Revolutionary War. Virginia was the Birthplace of Presidents. Four of the first five presidents were from that Commonwealth.
However, by the time of the Civil War, the sun had set on Southern Hegemony, and this was really the main cause of the war. The South saw its institutions losing influence to a more industrialized North. It became intransigent. It refused to see the possibility that slavery would end. An offer to buy out the slaves would itself have resulted in immediate secession.
It’s interesting looking at the various articles of Secession in the South. All mention slavery as part of their inherit culture. That slavery was simply God’s owe law. It was for the best. Most interestingly, they all cited the refusal of the North to return runaway slaves as the main reason. So, how was secession going to solve this issue? If the North as part of the same nation as the South wasn’t returning slaves, would it improve by making the return of slaves an international issue?
Another interesting thing is that the Confederate constitution was almost word-for-word identical to the U.S. constitution except for a few minor points. One of the most interesting changes is the outright ban on the ability for the national government to fund transportation projects. In the Confederate states, the national government couldn’t build ports, light houses, or help organize railroads.
The South had seen the federal government used to help build the transportation infrastructure that helped the North to industrialize and thus out grow the South in terms of economy and population. To the South, this power of the federal government was what endangered the Southern-Way-Of-Life and the reason for the end of slavery.
Remember that Lincoln and the Republicans campaigned on the promise not to touch slavery where it existed. Lincoln spent much of the beginning of the Civil War restating this point. This was was not about freeing slaves. It was merely about preserving the Union.
Once the war progressed and slavery became more and more the central point of the war (especially after the Emancipation Proclamation which freed slaves in rebellious territory) Lincoln offered to have the federal government to offer compensated emancipation in the few slave states left under U.S. control. These loyal slave states refused to accept any such offer even though it became obvious that the Confederacy was losing the war, and that slavery was ending.
During the siege of Richmond when Grant had surrounded Richmond on three sides, the Confederate Congress met to consider General Lee’s proposal to offer slaves emancipation if they helped fight for the Confederacy and reenforced Lee’s collapsing defenses. The Congress refused to consider any such idea. Emancipating slaves would mean the end of the Southern Way of Life and the entire purpose of the Confederacy.
So, no. Compensated Emancipation wouldn’t have worked because the South would have never accepted it.
Yes and no. The British outlawed slavery, but not indentured servitude. So, you just con a bunch of coolies into signing stuff they don’t understand and ship them off forever. I don’t think all the contracts were dissolved until the 1920s.
So, evidently, it was still profitable for someone.
Slaves obviously weren’t earning wages that they could use to buy land and building supplies. So even if the slaves were providing the labor, the slave owner still had to pay for the supplies. And any labor slaves were using to maintain themselves was labor that wasn’t available for producing cash crops for the slave owner.
I blame John Calhoun.
The founding generation recognized slavery was a problem. Even most slave holders acknowledged it. The issues were how to eliminate slavery at a reasonable cost and without destroying the southern economy. If that attitude had lasted, compromise would have been possible.
But Calhoun came along in the first half of the 19th century and became the most vocal proponent of the idea that slavery was not a problem that needed to be solved. He argued that slavery was a good thing that needed to be protected and preserved. And he persuaded most southerners.
Indentured servitude was very different than chattel slavery. When you’re an indentured servant, you still were a free man and not a mere piece of property fit for whatever your master decides. Indentured servitude was for a short duration (somewhere between 4 to 10 years) and afterwards, you were free, had a marketable skill, and usually received a payment for your years of service. Although your employer could punish you, they couldn’t kill you or injury you beyond reason.
Actually, I blame the cotton gin. Before the cotton gin, most slaves had to have skills. They were coopers, brewers, carpenters, etc. They could be lent out, and usually were allowed to keep payments. Older slave quarters even had storage for the slave’s own property. Slavery was expensive. It was a dying institution and an embarrassment. The U.S. Constitution, although refers to slavery, never used that term.
Come the cotton gin, and cotton growing was a very profitable adventure – even more so when you have a large class of unpaid and unskilled workers. Suddenly, slavery didn’t look so bad. Southern states stated to pass laws limiting teaching slaves skills or even how to read. When the Confederacy was founded and needed a constitution, they simply borrowed those damn unionist Yankees, but changed all references in it from “and other people” to “slaves”.
Calhoun was merely the first what became known as “protecting the Southern way of life”. However, he wouldn’t have gotten very far if other Southerns didn’t find his words “enlightening”.
Here’s more on Lincoln and the concept of compensated emancipation. It wasn’t just an 1862 letter of his; it was an actual, detailed proposal discussed by the Cabinet and sent along to Congress, which did not approve it. Lincoln even looked as far ahead as 1900 for full emancipation: http://www.mrlincolnandfreedom.org/inside.asp?ID=35&subjectID=3