Almost none. A healthy young-ish adult slave in 1860 could easily bring $2000-$3000 at auction. That was far more than most farmers spent on their house, their horse, their livestock and their land combined. (There were many places in the south where land could be bought for $10 per acre or less, thus one family of slaves could easily be worth more than a thousand acres of land.) There were individuals and families who owned hundreds of slaves and to anybody who owned many slaves they were almost always the lion share of their owners wealth. Slaves were worth collectively several billions of dollars in 1860 (the most conservative estimate I’ve read was $4 billion but that’s doubtful considering there were just under 4 million slaves and even a cheap one sold for several hundred dollars) and that was a time when the word billion meant something and there were only a few hundred millionaires in the nation (and there wouldn’t be a billionaire for generations).
The best that could have been hoped for is some kind of reforms perhaps, but I seriously doubt they ever would have been emancipated without war. Most rich people aren’t willing to voluntarily not be rich and while the rich were the minority of the population in the south they were the vast majority in terms of policy makers. The fact it was an inhumane if not inhuman system was trumped by the fact that most people can work damned near anything into their moral code if not to do so would bankrupt them. I’ve few doubts if it were re-legalized that you’d have people would be buying them again tomorrow.
Right, but as you say above the Confederacy’s plan there (however badly thought out) was to pressure Britain to help diplomatically — perhaps in recognizing the Confederacy as an independent nation (a big prize they wanted, but never got), or at least in giving no help to the Union during the coming conflict.
So if instead the Confederacy had been allowed to leave in peace, then the embargo tactic against Britain doesn’t seem to have much of a point — aside from going mad with power.
Certainly possible — although the USA, now being a foreign country, would presumably start imposing tariffs on many or all imports from the CSA. If so, that could have led to lower cotton sales overall to the North, and then the CSA would actually need Europe more than it had before.
Actually their economic power over England, such as it was, was on the wane. The construction of the Suez Canal was no secret- Judah Benjamin could have given extemporaneous lectures worthy of any university on it without checking his notes as early as 1861- and while it wasn’t certain when it would be completed it was pretty much assumed it would be that at some point and that once that happened the cotton fields of sub-Egyptian east Africa and India would become major competition for the U.S. south, which of course they did.
Possibly the South’s most fatal mistake other than the firing on Ft. Sumpter was it’s overestimation on how willing Britain was to aid the south. In addition to Sampiro’s point about Britain becoming less dependent on southern cotton were additional factors:[ul][]For starters, this was only a few years after the end of the Crimean War, which for the time being had majorly soured the British public and government on foreign adventures. It showed that Britain was a mighty naval power but had surprisingly little capacity to put boots on the ground. If Britain had wanted to aid the South, it couldn’t have done much more on the American mainland than land an expeditionary force or two, or apply pressure from Canada.[]As far as naval power goes, the great hope of the South- that Britain would declare the Union Navy’s blockade of the Southern coast nonbinding and break it- ran smack against the fact that blockades were the single greatest component of HMRN’s strategic power, and that to set a precedent that blockades were illegal would boomerang against Britain. Indeed, the British actually tolerated the Union stopping ships conducting indirect trade with the Confederacy via third parties- a precedent that Britain itself cited during WW1.As it so happened, the South seceeded at a time when Britain was glutted with both overstocks of cotton and an overproduction of cloth. If not a single fiber of Southern cotton had crossed the Atlantic thereafter it would have been a year before any shortage was felt.[/ul]
U.S. bank failures during the late 1850s, especially in the north, had prompted a federal bailout (nothing new about those, just the amounts) which resulted in the sale of more than $500 million in U.S. bonds to English and European bankers and brokerages. Since the CSA would not assume any more than- at absolutely most- a minor percentage of that indebtedness and even that they’d have played hell trying to collect, angering the U.S. by coming to the aid of its enemy would have endangered most of these bonds and caused the collapse of many Anglo-European banks, brokerage houses, and private fortunes, which is another reason they weren’t too keen to come to the aide of the Confederacy.
The Trent Affair caused them to bitchslap the U.S. but that’s because not to have bitch slapped would have been a show of weakness and it didn’t require actually spilling blood. They never came close to openly siding with the Confederacy.
It’s been my understanding since childhood that slavery not only wasn’t a necessity; it was an economic drag on the South ( and that this was known before the Civil War ). Oh, sure, a relatively few people were greatly enriched by slavery; but the South as a whole suffered because slavery is simply an inefficient way of doing things. And on top of that, slavery caused various psychological/social problems that held the South back; such as the educated class being unwilling to put its education to practical use because real work was beneath them ( shades of the ancient Greeks there ), and the deliberate policy of keeping slaves as ignorant as possible making them useless for any but the crudest forms of labor. It’s not a coincidence that the free North economically outstripped the slave South.
Yes. Also don’t forget the moral psychology of it; if they admit that slavery is unnecessary, inefficient and unjust, then they have to admit ( at least to themselves ) that they abused and oppressed and exploited all those people for no good reason. Much more comforting to tell themselves lies about how what they were doing was just and necessary.
Thanks for the replies, interesting to see the different viewpoints regarding the south.
What intrigues me is why the south clung on to slavery with such fervour for their cotton production, hoping to use ‘King Cotton’ to their advantage. As pointed out by Lumpyabove, this was a complete failure, since Britain had plenty of cotton from Egypt and India. Yet by this point slavery had been illegal in the Empire for decades - why couldn’t the south use the same techniques and replace slavery?
Slavery, also pointed out above, is expensive (you have to buy them, feed them, quarter them and so on) - and inefficient. Adam Smith in the previous century had argued that it is not economical, and the technology was there.
Was it, as Sampiro suggests, the fact that they had already invested so much in the institution (no doubt combined with a great deal of racism)?
It was still cheaper to import from America than India until the Suez canal, and when they did turn increasingly to India it was under colonialism and not exactly fairly remunerated free workers.
It’s cheaper than free labor however. If you have free employees you have to pay them enough to be able to feed and clothe and shelter themselves. (This isn’t to say you have to pay them to live well- plenty of slums and malnourished free workers after all- but you did have to pay them.) Slaves you just supplied the food and housing yourself, which was double cheap since the food was grown and the housing built by slave labor, so almost no real cash outlay. The most expensive cash expense in owning slaves- this is from several sources- was shoes. (Shoes were very expensive at the time; even the mass produced ones from northern factories- which is usually what slaves got- were many times more expensive than shoes today; one of the most common complaints about everyday life you’ll read in the slave narratives is that their feet hurt because the shoes were cheap and didn’t fit well.)
Also, if you hire free labor- a potato Irish married couple let’s say- it’s immaterial to you whether he and she have no kids or 16 kids; in fact if it’s the latter it’s probably an annoyance since it means she’ll be out of work a lot (you save her salary perhaps but you lose her labor). With slaves, every child born to them is your property, and it’s the most valuable property you have.
During the 19th century many of the larger slaveowners in Virginia and the Carolinas were making more money selling and leasing their slaves than from their plantation. In South Carolina for example- the only state that had more slaves than free whites- the market was terrible, so they sent them south and west. Selling slaves to Texas was especially lucrative, and some made so much money doing this they went into full time slave trading.
In last wills and testaments whenever a female slave of fertile age (or younger) is bequeathed her “increase” is usually referred to, meaning that if I leave you ‘my Negroes Dick and Sally and their increase’ then I’m also leaving you any children they may have. If Sally is worth $1000- an amount that’s going to depreciate as she ages- she might be capable of producing 5 or 10 or even more healthy offspring who’ll be worth many times that. (Sometimes you’ll see wills where a slave woman is bequeathed but NOT her “increase”, which returns to the estate after the death of the beneficiary or whatever [essentially the beneficiary gets the use of the slave woman for their lifetime.)
Anyway, a long way of saying that slaves, like all other humans, were fruitful and multiplied and thus so did the owner’s fortune. Thomas Jefferson was one of many masters who gave all manner of gifts to the parents of healthy newborn slaves (chickens, clothing, small amounts of cash, etc.) as incentives for them to be as fruitful as possible (though he preferred they pace themselves to on average one baby every two years as more than that tended to lead to unhealthy mothers and babies).
I think that was a great deal of it. And a great deal of the “investment” was psychological; they’d convinced themselves that slavery was a necessity and a virtue in itself.
IMHO, much of the problem is that from the beginning of the country, if they only applied their own principles fairly and rationally, they’d have had to give up slavery. These weren’t people who had no concept of rights; they were people who said “all men are created equal”, then enslaved some of them and called them inferior. They didn’t want to change their values, nor did they want to admit what they were doing was wrong by those same values; so instead they wrapped themselves more and more in a state of self delusion. They told themselves lies about how what they were doing was necessary, how it was just, and so on. And as the North progressed just fine without slavery, that forced them to become ever more irrational on the subject in order to deny the living refutation of their claims that the North became.
And finally, eventually, they had twisted their society into something that wasn’t much more than a machine for justifying and promoting slavery. I recall reading how Southerners travelling to the North would express surprise when they heard a preacher talk about some other subject than slavery, because defenses of slavery were all they ever heard from the pulpit. They couldn’t head down the path to industrialization like the North because that threatened slavery with obsolescence, and that was unthinkable. They fought the Civil War because slavery was threatened, and by then slavery was the most important aspect of their entire society; everything else was subservient to preserving it. Their own prosperity, their own lives were second to slavery.
As a demonstration of how much of the south’s wealth was in slaves:
I was recently researching Oscar Wilde’s southern relatives. His maternal uncle, John Kingsbury Elgee, was one of the richest planters in the south with vast holdings in Louisiana and Mississippi. Shortly before the war he consolidated his debts by borrowing $600,000 from a New York financier in exchange for which he gave a mortgage on 3 plantations totaling about 1,600 acres of extremely valuable land with river frontage and 515 slaves. Over the next few years he managed to repay half the loan.
In 1867 the financier foreclosed on the loan. Obviously they could no longer redeem slaves so they sold the land and farm equipment and livestock at public auction. It brought $10,250 towards satisfaction of a $300,000 debt. (They got a judgment against Elgee’s heirs of course but a fat lot of good that did; it’d be like somebody getting a $5 million judgment against me- in a way it’s less terrifying than a $5,000 judgment which I would have to pay because I could get $5,000- no way I’m gonna get $5 million so I’ll declare bankruptcy and whistle “So Long Deary”.)
Also on the subject of slave leasing: Robert E. Lee’s father, a Revolutionary War hero known as “Lighthorse Harry” Lee, was a financial disaster cloud who went through his own fortune and the fortunes of both of his wives due to bad investments and gambling. He fled the country when Robert (a child of his second marriage) was a boy.
Lee’s mother was left with the use of a house in Alexandria, VA (now a suburb of D.C., though at the time that wasn’t saying a lot), a small trust fund left by her father that was set up in such a way her husband’s creditors couldn’t touch it but which did not generate anywhere near enough money to live comfortably on, and about 18 slaves who had been bequeathed to her by various relatives (or actually bequeathed to her children in order to guarantee their safety from Lighthorse Harry’s creditors). She kept a domestic staff from among the slaves and leased the rest to a local planter. The money she got from the lease (slaves generally leased for roughly 10% of their value per year) was the lion’s share of the income to the household and it’s what Lee lived on as a kid.
Lee was- even by the standards of the 1850s south- a white supremacist. It’s often stated that he loathed slavery, which is true but in his case not particularly admirable as he mainly loathed it for the fact it forced whites to associate with/depend upon blacks. The slaves he supervised on his father-in-law’s plantation, who actually knew he was working to free them per the terms of his father-in-law’s will, detested him. I’ve wondered before if this animosity he felt had to do with the fact he grew up far more closely to the reality that everything his family had have including the food in their mouths was derived directly from African labor because unlike most families- who at least owned the land the slaves worked on- they owned nothing but the slaves. (It definitely influenced his sister, an abolitionist and Unionist who wrote to him many times of how glad she was they did not own slaves and how evil it was; he would correct her that ‘yes, it’s good we don’t own them’ but that slavery was a kindness and nowhere in Africa did negroes live as well as U.S. slaves.)
His father-in-law’s estate and J.K. Elgee’s are also another major factor: most southern planters were in debt up to their nipples in good years and to their eyeballs in bad years. Most were in no position to free their slaves if they wanted to; it was very rare for a planter, even a millionaire planter (and they did exist) to have a significant amount of cash or to not have a huge percentage of their property in mortgage. Also, this being agriculture, even if you are a shrewd manager and have super rich land and the hardest working slave labor force in the state any number of things that are completely beyond your control can happen to nearly bankrupt you; on the Mississippi, source of many of the richest planter fortunes (almost like the American Nile) hurricanes and floods were a catastrophe that you could pretty much count on at least once a decade or so. (I recently read a letter from Varina Davis [wife of Jefferson Davis] from 1857 in which she tells her mother about how Jefferson rowed a canoe from their front porch to his brother’s mansion 5 miles away after a severe flooding.) When this happened if you weren’t in debt you went into debt, and if you were in debt you went further into debt.
Perhaps worth noting that the downside is that it required a great deal of infrastructure, which is why slavery was a creature primarily of the large plantations. Also, there are parallels to the establishment of company towns by large corporations.
I’ve always heard, in the context of the Roman Empire, that slaves do not reproduce their own numbers. Was this not true of the American South?
Nicely put. Add in also the fear of social chaos if the slave population were to be set free. The South was riding a tiger with no way to get off.
First, British naval superiority was not as great as it appeared on the surface. This was right around the time when naval tactics were undergoing a major revolution. So the British had a much larger navy than the Americans - but the vast majority of their navy was becoming obsolete. If you just looked at the modern ironclad steamships, the British edge over the United States was much narrower.
Secondly, a blockade is a double-edged sword. The Americans had a large commercial fleet and it would have seriously hurt them to be blockaded. But the biggest trade item they were carrying was grain to the United Kingdom. So cutting off American trade would hurt Britain almost as much as it hurt America.
Third, there was a non-naval factor also. Fighting America would have been a serious political issue in Britain. This was an era when the electorate in England was still relatively narrow. But Parliament wasn’t stupid - they were aware there was also a very large non-voting population that had its own views. England had avoided most of the revolutionary wave they overwhelmed Europe in 1848 but there were people in England who had they same grievances as their continental counterparts. They were resentful about the stratification of the British economy and the narrowness of the vote. And many of these people looked to the United States as an example of a better way.
So if Parliament had declared war on the United States, the British masses would have been angry. They would have been the ones seeing their taxes rise and their food prices soar and they would have been the ones being sent off to fight. And they would have been doing this so their government, which wouldn’t let them vote, could supress another government that was more democratic.
No, slavery in the United States was very unusual in that it was one of the only wide-spread systems of slavery in which the slave population increased itself. Most slave populations declined in number and had to be maintained by introducing new slaves.
There’s little parallel to slavery in Rome and the U.S… In Rome they were cheap- many owners chose to work them to death and buy new ones- but in the U.S. they were expensive- you were as likely to provide a doctor for a slave as for any member of your family because- well, even if there’s no human bond (and there definitely was sometime- not all slaveholders were inhumane, which really makes it scarier) it’s still the equivalent of burying a car in the cemetery. (Automobiles are the closest thing you could compare slaves to in price- for a good used car expect to spend several thousand dollars and from there you can go as high as you want to go.)
This book says the birth rate for slaves was on par with that for European women. Another site I found says the average slave mother had 3.6 children but it wasn’t sourced. However, the best evidence is that the slave population in the U.S. more than doubled between 1820 (1,538,000) and 1860 (3,953,000) in spite of the negligible amount of slave ships that arrived*. The number of free blacks did not grow much faster than the slave population (1820- 233,000/1860-488,000).
*In addition to the fact the slave trade from Africa was outlawed, “homegrown” slaves were preferred for several reasons:
-they spoke English (or French, or whatever the language of the area was)
-having never been free they were less likely to rebel or seek freedom (or so it was believed; Nat Turner wasn’t born in Africa)
-they grew up being trained in American customs, agriculture, farm life, etc…
The only real advantage to African slaves was that they were cheaper and for that there was a reason.
Nicely put. Add in also the fear of social chaos if the slave population were to be set free. The South was riding a tiger with no way to get off.
[/QUOTE]
In the Caribbean, especially in the 18th century, the mortality rates *were *on par with the birth rates and sometimes in excess of them. In Haiti (St. Domingue) most slaves died within 10 years of their arrival due to the overwork, heat, natural disasters, and various diseases [and of course when Satan made that pact with Pat Robertson it didn’t help]). Brazil wasn’t much better in work conditions but it was easier to escape to the wilderness where some native tribes took in African slaves. As bad as the U.S. (or North America) was in terms of slavery, in general slaves did have it better here than in other parts of the New World.
Cuba and some of the other Spanish islands were interesting in that while they were among the the worst places to be a slave- you essentially had a dog’s chance in hell of living to be a grandparent- they did have some liberties that other nations did not. One was that if a slave wanted to buy his freedom and was able to raise 5% of the purchase price, his master was obligated to enter into a contract to sell it to him with the Catholic church holding the money and overseeing the deed.
Most Abps of Cuba and the Cardinals to whom they reported in Spain were strongly abolitionist, but while they were unable to illegalize the system (again- when there’s huge fortunes to be made people will tell the Pope, their mom, and the Pope’s mom to all go screw- courteously) they were enable to enact some reforms, and this was one. A slave who could come up with 1/20 [5%] of his value could give it to the church who would hold it in escrow along with any future payments. Once he paid a certain amount he was allowed certain liberties- for example, once he paid half of his purchase price he was allowed to spend 3 days per week away from his master’s plantation, during which time he could work for wages, which meant that usually raising the first 5% was the hardest, the next 45% very hard, and then the rest of the time (when he had liberty to work for wages) went very fast. Many slaves purchased their freedom this way, ultimately paying 105% of their purchase price (100% to the master and 5% to the church).
The church also held as sacrosanct any marriages among baptized slaves performed by a priest and the couple could not be sold apart. By contrast if the Episcopal Archbishop of Virginia and the Chief Justice of the SCotUS tag teamed to perform a marriage between two slaves in the U.S., it still had absolutely no legal bearing.
However, as mentioned, life was so harsh that few slaves in the Caribbean made it to 40, and beatings and rapes were common.
Owning slaves was an obvious outward sign of wealth. Never underestimate the power of showing off wealth.
In addition, the underclass of Britain identified more with the North (which was more working class and anti-slavery) than the South (which was more aristocratic). There was plenty of sentiment against the Confederacy.
That said, Britain didn’t have to support the Confederacy with troops. Simply recognizing the Confederacy as a legitimate country could easily have turned the tide against the Union.
Slavery may be “inefficient” for an economy as a whole, but it’s spectacularly efficient for slave owners. An economy with wage labor will produce more, but the proceeds will be distributed much more heavily toward laborers and less heavily toward land owners.
Little Nemo has it right, and I don’t deny it (I jsut got tired of writing). I wanted to point out mainly that the anti-slavery movement never moved out the north, and primarily the northeast. This hardened the issue brutally, by making the entire thing a sectional/regional argument in which people were arguing with those they considered “outsiders” or foreigners. Likewise, people who were native-southern antislavery-ers tended to drift into the northwest. Later on, in the 1850’s, some were even driven out of their homes altogether simply for not agreeing with slavery.
I used to be under the same impression, but in reading Lies My Teacher Told Me, my paradigm shifted, so to speak.
Slavery wasn’t costly to slaveowners at all when you consider that most if not all their affluence would not have been there had there not been slaves. The houses they lived in? Built by slaves. The money they used to purchase property (including slaves) came from selling crops sown and harvested by slaves, or by selling slaves. Seed purchased for crops was bought with slave money. The clothes they wore came from cotton farmed by slaves. The food they ate came from livestock and vegetables raised by slaves. The heirs of wealthy plantation owners inherited wealth that came from slaves. Slaves reproduced themselves, as well, so buying slaves wasn’t a necessity.
Sure, slaves had to be fed and housed. But the slaveowners only nominally provide them with these things. Slaves produced the very same crops that they ate, and built their own sleeping quarters using timber that was chopped down by themselves or other slaves.
To drive a car one must periodically put fuel in the tank. If you steal a car and use it as transportation for work, yes you will have to pay money for fuel every so often. This doesn’t mean that owning a stolen car is costing you anything. Your net gain still far exceeds the shillings lost from paying for upkeep.
It should also be noted that there’s a big difference between anti-slavery and abolitionism. “Anti-slavery” meant people who were against its expansion, did not want it in their section, and if they could wiggle their nose like Samantha and do away with it altogether probably would have but it wasn’t anything they actively sought. Abolitionists were people who wanted slavery illegalized and the existing slaves freed, preferably immediately but at very least in stages (which is how it was usually done in the north).
Abolitionists were always a small minority and in fact were often unpopular even in the north and free states. They were often regarded as fanatics (to use Churchill’s definition: “one who can’t change his mind and won’t change the subject”), misguided or dangerous (which was the case with at least some).
For those who were anti-slavery in the free states, the main objections were usually not ethical but financial: they did not want to compete with slave economy. The slaveowning plutocrats in the south were like kudzu- they may start out small but soon they’re going to smother everything and most of the small farmers would wind up as vassals to the planters: they may own their own land and maybe even a few slaves but they’re going to have to turn to the local lord(s) when they need their cotton baled and transported or if they needed cash for a new mule or to tide them over til harvest system, and the lord was usually more than happy to help them out- “just sign this piece of paper”- and it was essentially an antebellum agricultural equivalent of the payday loan- you never quite seemed to pay it off (or, if you did, it was only for a while).
Many people in the border states and the states/territories that bordered the border states (e.g. Illinois, Indiana, Kansas) were southerners who went their specifically to get away from this type of American feudalism. One of the most notable was perhaps Tom Lincoln*, who left Kentucky over his frustration in (among other things) the oligarchy of rich planters.
In the South those who were anti-slavery- and there were more than you might think, but many of them kept quiet about it- tended to be so for ethical reasons. Mary Chesnut- who as a woman did not have a vote- saw it as a wicked system for the way it debased slave women specifically and for the fact it was the ultimate hypocrisy in a Christian nation, but- and this is important- she recorded those feelings in her diary and did not make them public. (I’ve wondered if her husband or her father either one had mulatto children, for she reserves her harshest words for those who did, and to her credit she does not blame or fault the slave women [which some women did].)
There were others like Thomas Jefferson who (though definitely paternalistic and white supremacist definitely saw the evils of slavery and wrote about them openly, but ultimately a fat lot of good that did the slaves since he never tried to actually bring about any kind of resolution. **
One of the pities of the hidden history of America is that we know there were many southerners who were stops on the Underground Railroad, but we’ll never know their names. In the north after the war having been an UR stop was a feather in your cap- I’ve seen it used as a selling point in real estate ads for houses in Ohio and NH {where if there’s so much as a root cellar it’ll be claimed it was an UR stop}, but in the south even (perhaps especially) after the war, you still didn’t talk about it. Even Harriet Tubman, speaking years after the war, took care not to out those who had helped her in Maryland and northern Virginia for fear of repercussions.
Mary Todd Lincoln did make it known that her [I hate to use the term, but she did] mammy in Kentucky helped runaways by bringing them food. The family ‘officially’ didn’t know she was doing this due to plausible deniabilty (her father was a slaveowning abolitionist- a minority to be sure but there were more than you might think**) but at the same time would look the other way when she cooked extra food or disappeared to “wherever she goes behind the coach house” after breakfast.
*In some biographies it’s said he left Kentucky due to the difficulty in getting clear land titles, which is also true, but this also had to do with rich planters.
**The most damnable thing to me about Jefferson is not that he owned slaves [for that’s one of those ‘time and place’ things] or that he had an affair with/children by one [for we don’t know the details] but that he did see what a dehumanizing and evil system it was, yet it didn’t stop him from living extravagantly and recklessly even though he knew it was brought about by slave labor and even though he knew he was so deep in debt that he could not ever hope to emancipate his slaves like Washington had. Jefferson prided himself over never having separated slave families, but because of his debts and bankruptcy when he died his slaves were sold to the four corners of the earth away from family. Jefferson, as often was the case [such as with an overseer he admitted used the lash too much, or the revolving service door that allowed him to eat his meals without seeing a slave], did not have to see the effects of his actions where they were concerned.
***An important thing to know about Mary’s father, Robert Todd, that distinguished him from other slaveowners is that his wealth was greatly diversified; he did own farms and slaves to work them but he also had interests in a racetrack, a hotel, banking, shipping and other non-slavery dominated businesses, thus meaning he could afford to take the hit of slaves being freed, especially if it was gradual. Like most slaveowners who were willing to consider emancipation, he was a Whig- in fact he lived across the street from Henry Clay who was a close family friend [and a slaveowner willing to open emancipation for discussion so long as some kind of reimbursement and debt forgiveness was discussed].