You’re talking about Carver. Yes, he was a major figure in the development of crop rotation.
But crop rotation isn’t the key factor in modern agriculture. It was the invention of artificial fertilizer that’s led to modern crop yields and the ability to keep using the same land year after year.
Which means our ability to feed eight billion people is dependent on our finite supply of fossil fuel. But that’s a whole different ticking time bomb.
Can’t remember where now but years ago I read an analysis that even without the Civil War slavery as an institution would have collapsed by 1890.
Of course that would have extended the abomination another generation.
That raises a question I’ve wondered about, but I think it’s better suited for FQ:
No it does not get a pass. Harm is harm. The motive is relevant for understanding the underlying process. Backstory: liberals have a blindspot for malice (and to a lesser extent deception and to a much lesser extent bad faith). @Der_Trihs sees malice as a prime motivator for conservatism everywhere. That’s a useful corrective. Because liberals really do miss that element entirely. In this context, legalized rape for slave drivers was part of the attraction, an argument I haven’t encountered too much, at least explicitly. Probably because it’s gross. Maybe Little_Nemo (who has read a lot of history) has. It’s conveyed by London School of Economics graduate Mick Jagger.
I hypothesize that malice stems from conservatives doing things or advocating things that they know are wrong. It’s a defensive mechanism. If you misunderstand this process, you will misunderstand the underlying situation. Der sees plenty of examples of liberals screwing up their analysis because they overlook malice altogether. He sees them because they exist. But that doesn’t mean malice is the full story (no kidding) but also I argue it’s a secondary motivator stemming from other frankly ugly stuff.
That’s part of it. The other part was that while slavery had been practiced for thousands of years this was an early example of slavery co-existing within a system of world trade driven by falling transport costs. Competitive pressures tended to squeeze production units and slave drivers who were uncomfortable with the cruelty would typically sell their slaves to another slave driver. The combination of chattel slavery along with world market competitive pressures made antebellum slavery a little different. Contrast traditional agricultural markets where bad harvests would be counterbalanced by higher agricultural output prices and visa versa. Sell in a world market and that cushion is lost.
That came out of lost cause scholarship. It’s been decisively refuted, starting in the 1950s and cemented by Nobel Laurette Robert Fogal. Plantations would have gone bankrupt when the price of cotton dropped following the civil war. But that just means that slaves would have been resold at a loss (similarly for land). Showing that the existing system was unsustainable doesn’t imply emancipation (or free land for everyone for that matter).
But without the plantations how much demand for slaves would there be? Who are they going to sell them to if everyone is broke? I’m guessing – without scholarship – it would devolve to the same sharecropping we did get, the big guy owning the land and getting a big share from the former slaves farming it.
Come to think of it, tenant farming in pre-famine Ireland looks about the same.
They’d still find some way to keep them enslaved, even if it wasn’t economical, because economics was never the point, and plantation farming with slaves already wasn’t economical.
Yes. By the time of the Civil War, slavery was what the South was about; they’d converted their culture into a machine for protecting and promoting it. I recall reading how Southerners who visited Northern churches were surprised to hear anything from the priest except sermons on how slavery was necessary and just. Decades of trying to justify the blatantly evil and self-destructive practice of slavery did that to them; they became both obsessed and detached from reality.
And led to the Civil War both because they couldn’t accept slavery not expanding without limit, and because their irrationality blinded them to how the North outmatched them.
By 1830 slavery was primarily located in the South, where it existed in many different forms. African Americans were enslaved on small farms, large plantations, in cities and towns, inside homes, out in the fields, and in industry and transportation.
… The standard image of Southern slavery is that of a large plantation with hundreds of slaves. In fact, such situations were rare. Fully 3/4 of Southern whites did not even own slaves; of those who did, 88% owned twenty or fewer. Whites who did not own slaves were primarily yeoman farmers.
Forced labor could be redeployed. Money could be borrowed. Think about recurring farm crises in the US. Farms go bankrupt. Others buy the land and keep going. Land prices fall, but they don’t drop to zero. Those arguing that slavery would have died on its own didn’t think deeply enough about the underlying economics. Not coincidentally many of them were Southern apologists. But moreover, the field of history made a lot of errors about economics before economists waded in.
In order for slavery to disappear without state intervention, the price of a slave at auction would have to fall to zero and stay that way. That’s unlikely. Even then, those committed ideologically to the program would want to keep it going. Recall the apparent psychological benefits of paint-peeling white supremacy among certain personality types. You don’t need this last plank though. Fogal covered the scenario with everyone acting rationally (really?!?) and the price of forced labor at auction doesn’t drop to zero.
Nix those last two sentences. It will take us into the weeds. Fogal posited that the price of forced labor would have continued to increase without the Civil War. That was a contentious claim. But the slavery dying on the vine hypothesis is very far anybody’s serious analysis of the economics.
I don’t think I’ve read any of Fogel’s works. I’ll have to check him out.
One book I have read on this subject is The Scorpion’s Sting: Antislavery and the Coming of the Civil War by James Oakes. Oakes outlines the ideas I described above; how slavery would be eliminated by cutting it off from new territory and confining it to its existing states. I can’t state for a fact that this would have worked if secession and the Civil War had been avoided. But it was widely seen as a viable plan in the antebellum period.
Time on the Cross was a contentious piece of work which I am not recommending. I would recommend A New Economic View of American History: From Colonial Times to 1940 which walks through the back and forth. If you still want to read Time on the Cross after that, fine: you will at least have an idea of what you’re getting into. I stressed the historical consensus here and didn’t get into Fogal’s idiosyncratic-but-not-really-it’s-standard-Chicago-School-stuff perspective.
Review of Time on the Cross, gifted:
Although Time on the Cross is not a counterfactual exercise, it relies on chains of assumption and estimation that are no less daring than the ones Fogel employed in the railroad study. But there is a difference. In the railroad study the conjectural elements of the work are plainly exposed to view, as cliometric doctrine requires. In Time on the Cross they are hidden from all but specialists. Most readers of Time on the Cross see only the silk purse of apparent scientific exactitude; the authors spared them the sight of the sow’s ear from which it all came.
This neat trick the authors accomplished by splitting Time on the Cross into two volumes, one for general readers, the other for specialists. Volume one is written in a brisk, declarative style that achieves terrific argumentative force by eschewing the tedious tasks of qualification and substantiation. It has no footnotes, much less extensive specification of assumptions. It “announces” findings in the way an astronomer might announce the discovery of a new planet, and it heaps scorn on previous interpretations, especially those of Kenneth Stampp of Berkeley, as if they were astrological gibberish written by men unequipped with a telescope. But the tiresome qualifications, discussion of evidence, and specification of assumptions—the things that give cliometrics its rigor—were relegated to volume two.
Or at least they were supposed to be. Volume two is indeed jammed with tables and equations and cryptic descriptions of procedure, but in fact it often fails to substantiate the story told so simply in volume one. One cannot even find in volume two the citations for quotations presented in volume one. The authors have been apologetic about this failure in documentation which they explain as a result of the haste with which volume two had to be thrown together at the last minute—they originally planned to publish the undocumented popular volume alone!
There’s a consensus that drops out Fogal and his critics which I’ve discussed here; I don’t think much of unfiltered Fogal.
The rather damning 1975 NY Review of Books article cited above covers a Rochester Conference where various cliometricians tore into Fogal and Engerman’s work (TotC). The following quote gives a flavor of the shoddiness of TotC’s argument, but also that slavery was more reign of terror than bloodbath:
Similarly, as Gutman points out, readers of Time on the Cross are inclined toward a benign view of slavery when they read that the average slave on the Barrow plantation received only 0.7 whippings per year. In the first place the figure is too low because it is based on an erroneous count both of the number of slaves Barrow owned and the number of times he whipped them. But more important, the figure is not the most relevant measure of the importance of whippings. A whipping, like a lynching, is an instrument of social discipline intended to impress not only the immediate victim but all who see or hear about the event. The relevant question is “How often did Barrow’s slaves see one of their number whipped?”—to which the answer is every four and a half days. Again, the form in which the figures are expressed controls their meaning. If one expressed the rate of lynchings in the same form Fogel and Engerman chose for whippings, it would turn out that in 1893 there were only about 0.00002 lynchings per black per year. But obviously this way of expressing the data would cause the reader utterly to misunderstand the historical significance of the 155 Negro lynchings that occurred in 1893.
Every 4 1/2 days. Stunning.