I never said that, no. But generally the government was not actively involved in keeping slaves in bondage. Slave holders were the first line of control, after that citizen militias did most of the rest. Very few slave rebellions ever required Federal government intervention. I know John Brown’s Raid was suppressed by Federal forces, but I’m struggling to remember any others that were. Nat Turner’s rebellion was put down by militia, and it was one of the larger slave rebellions.
It prevented free blacks from participating in a good portion of the economy–that is definitely government regulation of the labor market. How does it compare to our modern day prohibitions on children working, workplace safety, unemployment insurance etc?
But unfree blacks were considered chattel, so economically I don’t know why I’d look at them as part of the labor market and not part of the assets and plant equipment side of things.
They were viewed as chattel, and even that specific term was used in legal documents.
Each colony and later each slave state had specific black / slave codes that had regulations both for how you treated your slave and sometimes limitations on punishment (usually they leaned more toward punishing the slave holder for not punishing slaves harshly enough side of things.) But that doesn’t change the fact they did not have legal person hood under any understood definition of that term, nor does it neutralize the fact they were in fact chattel. Animal cruelty laws don’t make livestock no longer chattel.
You could look at it that way, but it’s just as valid to say they were not part of the labor market at all. I don’t think you can simply say “all humans = labor.”
I don’t really know what point WillFarnaby was trying to make nor do I want to explore it. But in general it is true that the interested powerful elites in the pre-Civil War United States (and in the current United States) sought to use government to advance their commercial interests. This was true for southern planters as much as it was for northern industrialists. It has nothing to do with why the south actually seceded as that was based purely on the political issue of slavery, and the rhetoric used in response to Lincoln’s election related to the belief in the South that while Lincoln himself wouldn’t end slavery he would set the course to eventually denying “their children and grandchildren their birthright.”
Government doesn’t have to take a position on slavery one way or another. Slavery can and does exist where governments hardly do.
It’s worth noting the Federal government by and large had no actual position on slavery in general, that was almost entirely a function of State laws. So the actual government the South secede from did not really have many laws on slavery. They obviously outlawed the slave trade, the Federal constitution had the 3/5ths compromise and a few other things, but by and large slavery was a product of State law and not Federal law. So there is no inconsistency in a slave holder wanting to leave the Federal government since they had no problem with the State government which was the government actually creating statutes relating to slave holding.
State and local governments were extremely heavily involved in the day-to-day actions of restricting the rights of slaves. Citizen militias can be considered part of state and local government, considering that they usually received official sanction and often material assistance (supplies, weapons, etc). And state and local governments were heavily involved in finding and “returning” escaped slaves. Even if your position is that the actions of state and local governments don’t matter with regards to whether a market can be characterized as “free”, it’s pretty clear that there was extremely onerous regulation by various governments on the free exercise of economic rights.
How does slavery compare? It’s oodles/miles/way-way-way more onerous on the market. Do you disagree?
Slaves did not have rights to restrict in the first place. However much of the militia activity was not funded or organized at the State level. State governments typically only got heavily involved with a militia when they had to be called up for actual deployments or such, in which case State control and funding became important. I’m differentiating from citizen militias and various formal state defense forces (like Virginia or Massachusetts had prior to the ACW) which were much more professional, State-level armies pre-Civil War.
Mind that in the mid-1800s much day to day security issues even in the well settled United States were not formally taken care of by the government. Almost nowhere had professional police and most “militia” activity were bands of citizens who met up and decided to take care of specific things as they arose.
My point is slaves aren’t part of the labor market. I was talking about black codes that restricted the economic freedom of free blacks. In general those are probably less restrictive than employment restrictions today simply because they affect far fewer people as a proportion of the population. Free blacks were a small portion of the population, even smaller than children are today, relative to the population in slave states.
I’m not clear exactly what a “semi-slave” is - the hotlink in the article just goes to the general article on slavery. At any rate, I do not see anything in that article that indicates slaves should not be considered part of the labor market. And in the portion I just quoted, I see several groups that are affected by one or more of the criteria you described that should exclude slaves from being counted as part of the labor market.
Actually, I don’t think that’s true - if someone says, “This guy is keeping me in chains and whipping me if I don’t do what he tells me!” then the government has to take a position on whether that treatment is legal or not.
I think this has gotten badly side tracked and I’m partly to blame.
A free market is one in which the government is not setting prices or engaging in excessive regulation.
Even if you view slaves as labor, I do not see how government statute allowing for the possession of slaves is any sort of centralized, government control of the labor market. The government is not enslaving anyone, it isn’t setting prices for the slaves, it is not requiring people to buy slaves. It instead is giving private individuals the legal framework in which they can take ownership of slaves. So laws allowing for slavery in and of itself, however you want to classify slaves, isn’t incompatible with the concept of the free market.
A government that allows one person to do something bad to another is not taking an active hand in a market because of that allowance.
Now, as I have said the slave states were not really free market (nor were the northern states), there were a lot of strange restrictions on businesses in the 19th century. It is often hailed (especially post Civil War) as the golden age (both in negative and positive connotations) of true laissez-faire economics. That’s true in some things, especially in matters of regulating (or lack thereof) of things like stock market manipulations, insider trading, collusion, employee mistreatment and etc. But on many matters the 19th century had strange restrictions from today’s viewpoint.
For example in many States you could not legally emancipate your slaves unless you provided also for their deportation. This is why Robert E. Lee and his wife actually sent many of their slaves to Liberia. They desired to emancipate their slaves, but legally they could not do so without providing for some means of getting them out of Virginia, and Liberia seemed the right place instead of sending them across State lines. Some States you could only emancipate your slaves with explicit approval from the State legislature. So as a matter of point the slave market was certainly not totally free in the South, but my point being slavery in and of itself doesn’t instantly mean you do not have a free market economy.
You don’t give livestock trials and you don’t prosecute farmers for “murder”, when they killed their chickens.
More importantly, they’re specifically referred to as “persons” in the US Constitution.
Sorry, but the Southern whites did not see them as animals and would have found your suggestions laughable.
Now, if you can list some instances of horses being put on trial for kicking their masters to death before a jury and being allowed to testify as well as humans being charged with “murder” for killing their dogs you’ll have a point.
Once again, I’d recommend reading Genovese or Eric Foner if you want a better writer.
What the article is trying to distinguish from is basically slavery conditions in which the slave does receive some actual wage compensation. Before more modern times for example, convicts were regularly forced into labor teams and then sent out to work. They were actually paid for this, but far below market rates, and they didn’t typically have the option to decline to work. So they were not free, but the article is differentiating them from a slave because they were actually paid a wage. That would be a type of “semi-slave” (I would guess–the article is not strong on that point.) A true slave is someone who both has no choice about their work and also is not paid for it, while someone like an apprentice or indentured servant typically was legally required to work in whatever way their master said, but they were compensated either in a small wage or in some other form. The apprentice compensated in education and eventually he’d be a journeyman and could go out on his own. The indentured servant received his pay up front in exchange for a period of servitude in which he wasn’t paid a regular wage.
Not all governments historically have provided the sort of robust criminal justice systems we are familiar with here in the United States.
I thought perhaps mistakenly one argument against WillFarnaby’s point that the South was being abused economically by Northerners in the Federal government was that the government was enabling the Southern planter lifestyle by allowing slavery. That isn’t really an apt point since it was State governments that allowed for slavery.
Generally slave holders were not prosecuted for murder when they killed their own slaves. It happened, but there’s only a few historical references to it that I’m aware of, and it appears many of them happened in the colonial era and less so in the United States era.
It was much more common to be prosecuted for killing someone else’s slave, and the primary injury was to the slave holder, not the deceased slave.
Additionally, many of the slave codes that provided for punishment for killing your own slave made it a fined offense, whereas murder was almost always punished by execution.
Most of the slave codes I’ve actually read that provide for punishments for mistreating slaves include fines denoted in pounds, which suggests much of this went away later on.
I’m talking of the philosophical / legal concept of “person” link. Generally under our Founding legal philosophies persons are born with certain “natural rights” and such, and the treatment and legal status of slaves shows them to clearly not have those rights.
Such person hood is not predicated on whether or not it is considered murder if you kill that person. Legally and philosophically, the way women, slaves and Native Americans were treated in the 19th century shows me they were not given the rights of person hood. Depending on when, where and whom we are talking about, they might have some of those rights. But as this concept existed (and even as it was expressed to a degree in the DoI) there were supposed to be a set of things legal persons had a right to no matter what. The freedom to move around, the freedom to pursue happiness, things of that nature. Having none of those core rights but punishing someone if they kill you is not the same as being a legal person.
I never said they saw them as animals. Chattel is not synonymous with animal.
Slaves obviously had rights to restrict if you believe “all men are created equal with certain inalienable rights”. And you’re picking nits about the militias- local mayors and sheriffs were usually involved with these citizen militias (giving them approval, giving them logistical assistance, etc). It wasn’t just a band of dudes who had no contact and relationship with the local government- messages were sent out, the local authorities were notified (and usually gave tacit or blanket approval), guns and supplies were distributed, etc. This was government, in the relatively informal way that much of government operated back then, using force and threat of force to prevent black people from being involved in the economy (among other things). If this isn’t “onerous regulation”, then nothing is.
Perhaps, but the codes (formal and informal) that restricted slaves behavior were far, far more restrictive, obviously, then any restrictions today.
Basically, my point is that the South was a “free market” in the same way that the South was a “popular revolution/secession”- only if you ignore millions of people (and majorities in some states) who obviously were not allowed to take part in the market, and opposed revolution/secession.
Because a legalized system of slavery sets heavy restrictions on a person’s ability to enter into contractual relationships. In a entirely free market, I can sell my labor to anyone for any price we can both agree to, and if we can’t agree to a price, either one of us can walk away from the deal. In a socialist economy, an employers rights are limited by the government, who says the employer is not allowed to offer less than a certain amount of money. In a communist economy, the government may even prevent the employer from turning down a job applicant.
In a slave economy, the government is telling the *employee *that they may not ask for a particular wage, or refuse a particular job. In both the slave and the communist society, the government is interfering with one party’s ability to freely enter into a contract with the other.
It is incompatible with a free labor market, and support for slavery is incompatible with free markets as an ideal. As I said in my last post, a slave labor market can co-exist with a free commodity market, and an individual can support a free market that benefits him, and oppose a free market that is disadvantageous to him. But if you hold up the free market as an ideal in and of itself, as the best way to run an economy regardless of personal short term benefit, then that position is not reconcilable with a support of slavery.
This is only important in the very narrow context of talking to WillFarnaby, who holds the free market as just such an ideal, and has tried to paint the secessionist South as holding it, too. I believe we’re both in agreement that the South had no such ideological bent, and only supported free markets to the extent that they directly benefited from them. I think their support of slavery is evidence of this lack of ideological commitment to free market economics.
And, by and large, Southern planters did use their greater power in Congress to advance their interests. They did not specifically have a goal of “punishing” industrial interests, but often policies that helped plantation owners either hurt industrial interests or, at best, locked up or further limited finite resources that could have helped the nation, over all.
Framing the discussion as a conflict between two competing approaches to economy is a more honest way to present the situation than WillFarnaby’s odd attempt to frame it as a moral issue in which the innocent South was the victim of the rapacious North. The South wielded political power disproportionate to its population, thanks, in large part to the 3/5 Compromise and it used that power to manipulate legislation so that no free state could be admitted without a corresponding slave state resulting in ongoing parity in the Senate. The South “won” about as many battles as it “lost” and the impetus for the Civil War was strongly influenced by the knowledge that eventually there would be more free states and that they would finally lose their disproportionate power in Congress.
Hmm. Maybe. I figured that was what they meant by “forced labor,” until I clicked on the link, and found myself on this page, which includes the following: “The archetypal and best-known form of unfree labour is chattel slavery, in which individual workers are legally owned throughout their lives, and may be bought, sold or otherwise exchanged by owners, while never or rarely receiving any personal benefit from their labour.”
True, but also not relevant to my point.
I can’t speak for anyone else, but I was not making that argument.
There were other deadening effects of slavery on the southern economy outside of its effects of the slaves themselves. The culture of the north encouraged entrepreneurism; a person in the north was considered a success if he started his own business and kept it growing. But the ruling social class in the south saw themselves as landed aristocrats - they figured the mark of success was owning a large estate. So if somebody in the south achieved success as a businessman, their goal would be to reach the level of success where he could afford to buy his own plantation and get out of whatever business he had been making money in. This pattern obviously put a brake on the overall growth of the economy.
The thing is unless you’re a libertarian, you accept the notion that society needs a government in order to function. And a government needs revenue to exist. And back in the 19th century, the idea of an income tax was still in its infancy as were many other forms of modern government revenue. Back then the government collected money from tariffs - they were the main form of government revenue.
But to generate revenue, you had to have a tariff on something that was being imported. And the United States was a predominantly agricultural country - we exported farm products not imported them. A tariff on foreign farm products would have been a joke.
The thing we imported was industrial goods. So that’s the government put a tariff on. The country imported industrial goods from Europe, the government collected a tariff on them as revenue, and everyone in America paid a higher price for these goods.
This created an opportunity in the marketplace. Americans who built factories could charge higher prices for domestically produced industrial goods because they were competing with higher priced foreign products. A lot of Americans did this and made good money.
As I pointed out in previous posts, there was nothing that prevented southerners from getting in on this. They had the capital to invest if they had wanted to build factories. But they chose not to because they preferred to keep their money in agriculture. Northerners were less fussy and they became industrialists.
So there was no plot against the south. It was just a chain of events:
The government needed money. Tariffs on imported goods were the way governments made money back then.
The United States imported industrial goods so that’s what the government put a tariff on.
The tariff on foreign industrial goods created opportunities for domestic industry.
Northerners chose to take those opportunities. Southerners chose not to.
Keep in mind that when the southern states declared their independence and formed a new country, one of the first things the Confederate congress did was enact its own tariff. The Confederate government needed money just as much as the American government did.
That was actually part of the problem with the economy of the south before the Civil War. For the most part, they didn’t have the capital to invest. Some did, obviously, but the majority of rich Southerners suffered from a liquidity problem. The rich planters tended to be cash poor, their wealth tied up in land and slaves, and they couldn’t easily liquidate it. And without a cash pool of ready money to spend, investment in industry suffered. There were exceptions, of course, but as a rule, the south was undercapitalized.
It certainly seems apparent that as long as the South was doing everything they could not to lose their power in Congress and using slavery to do it (such as making sure there was a parity of slave and free states admitted to the union), there was no way to avoid some sort of war. The South’s power and slavery seemed to be too intertwined that there was no way to lose one without losing the other. It also seems pretty apparent that there was no way for the South to eliminate slavery without suffering a lot of pain and damage. The war ripped the region apart and managed to eliminate slavery, but even doing it voluntarily over time was going to hurt quite a bit. But even after slavery was eliminated, the South managed to bring it back in modified form with Jim Crow laws and sharecropping after they pushed to end Reconstruction, so it was never going to be an easy thing to eliminate slavery no matter how it was done.