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.
In 1776, slaves could be owned legally in every state. Slavery ended at the state level in the northern states by 1800. So it is possible for slavery to end naturally at the local level.
Naturally?
Really?
Let me know what errors you find on the wiki page I linked.
But it wasn’t going to, and never fully did; we still use slaves in the form of prison labor.
Plus as I said in the post which seems to have touched this discussion off, it would have extended slavery another generation in a country whose founding document contains the phrase, “all men are created equal.”
Your cite doesn’t say that. Steelmanning I’ll pretend you said, “So it is possible to pass anti-slavery laws without a Civil War”.
But slavery still persisted in the North after 1800. From the table in your cite:
Connecticut: 1784 (gradual) 1848 (full)
New Jersey: 1804 (gradual) April 18, 1846
New York: 1799 (gradual) July 4, 1827 (full)
Pennsylvania: March 1, 1780 (gradual) 1847 (full)
Rhode Island: 1784 (gradual) 1843 (full)
One aspect I didn’t go into was the possibility of slaves escaping their kidnappers. I hypothesize there was more prospect for that in the north than the south. Indeed, it was a big sticking point before the Civil War. There’s also the matter that various factors would make slave auction prices higher in the south, further diminishing the slavedriving constituency in the north. None of this suggests that slavery would have died on the vine in the south after 1865 if the south was not forced to.
Thank you for stating your hypothesis as an hypothesis. Here’s the evidence against it.
Plantations operated via gang labor and beatings. That was no longer tenable after the Civil War (some tried). So the plantations were broken up and replaced with debt peonage. Under conditions of slavery gang labor with beatings was the lowest cost method of producing cotton for the kidnappers - I base that on their prevalence.
Generally speaking, if there’s a profitable enterprise, capital will flow to it. Maybe with bonds, maybe with bank loans, maybe with equity. This is especially true with capital markets spanning a wide geography.
There’s also an example from the era. In the early 1800s lots of canals were constructed using private capital (some organized with governments, but special bonds were floated for the projects). Then the railroad evolved into a cheaper form of transportation. What happened to the canals? Did they vanish? What happened was the canal companies went bankrupt, and loans and bonds were defaulted on. Canal projects were cancelled. But the existing canals typically stuck around for decades.
A canal that is built is a sunk cost. Its investors will have regrets after a lower cost technology is introduced. But just because it’s no longer economically viable to dig a new canal, doesn’t imply that existing canals will vanish. Similarly, a drop in cotton prices won’t lead to the abandonment of gang labor: it will just lead to the bankruptcy of existing plantations that had borrowed money. Lowest cost production methods (based on human rights violations and stolen labor) will endure.
A ban on corporal punishment might lead to the end of plantation farming. Maybe. But those sorts of laws weren’t politically viable in the South.
A version with the potential to be much longer-lasting, and far more profitable, than American antebellum chattel slavery.
(Is there a single Republican Party office-holder or candidate who would ever say even one negative word about the for-profit prison industry?)
rhetorical question