To all this add, as in the case of Robert E. Lee, if it ever became too expensive to clothe and house or maintain them, or if your farm failed, you could lease them (a major source of income to many slaveowners- practically all plantation owners leased slaves to or from others) or sell them. Slaves were always walking income producers.
The clothing produced in sweatshops today has many parallels to slavery. Even with the import duties and shipping costs it’s a helluva lot cheaper to get the goods from Cambodia or some other third world country where workers are paid for a day what Union workers would make in an hour or two. The relationship between American factory workers who have to compete with impoverished Third World workers is in some ways an echo of how northern and small time southern farmers felt about the competition with slaves.
Just a note: I wouldn’t take anything James Loewen says at face valuel. He’s almost always just saying something equally simplified and usually less correct than the views he dislikes. In aggregate, most of the things he complains about in his popular books are etachers saying perfectly accurate (and also correct in the big-picture sense) things which are just more complex than kids learning history need.
That’s unfortunately simplified. The region owed a great deal of its prosperity to slavery, but at the same time it’s unlikely to have been the most advantageous system. It benefited a small elite in the southeast, and a somewhat more diverse group in the old southwest (Mississippi, Texas, Arkansas, etc.). And as others pointed out, slave plantations were often deep in debt: the southeast was particualrly troubled because Virginia and Carolina plantations were being kept afloat mostly by selling slaves westward. Moreover, you’d be amazed at how much of the region’s food was produced in the Old Northwest, or by small regional farmers usually without slaves.
This is not to say that slavery couldn’t be profitable, but it was definitely a delicate and dangerously balanced system. In fact, it was so all-consuming and stressful part of the cause of the Civil War was the fear of being dominated econmically by the north. Naturally, there was no “united North” trying to dominate the SOuth until the Civil War and Reconstruction.
History’s ironies are brutal and grim, yet hilarious all the same.
In his defense, he seems to have been profligate by nature and was simply unable to adequately control his spending. Why is something of a mystery, but it may relate to the very genius which made him so scattershot-brilliant in so many fields. He simply couldn’t stick to just one thought or plan for very long, but constantly developed new ideas and tastes and expanded his mind. I don’t say this to excuse him, of course.
Something I’ve always found ironic is that written on the wall of the Library of Congress (along with 9000 other quotes admittedly) nd on half the items in their giftshop is Jefferson’s statement “I cannot live without books”.
The LoC was founded when Jefferson sold Congress most of his personal library for $28,000 because he was desperately in need of cash and their own library had burned with the capitol in 1814. Apparently he could live without them.
Don’t worry, I haven’t. But when it comes to portraying slavery as an expensive investment by slaveowners who were somehow working against their self-interest by taking on the onerous burden of slaves, Loewen has a point. With so much capital generated from slavery or by-products of slavery, its disingenuous to talk about how much slaves cost individual slaveowners without first examining the self-perpetuating wealth that slaves provided to slaveowners.
You’re talking about a system and its cost-benefits to a slaveholding region, but I’m talking about the direct costs-benefits to individual slaveholders. Two different things.
To return to my analogy: Inarguably, an individual profits greatly from using a stolen car (i.e. using a slave). But equally inarguably is the fact that society will suffer if everyone steals cars because no one will want to buy one (i.e. pay someone for decent wages). There’d also no longer be any incentive for manufacturers to improve upon their models (i.e. workmanship and productivity becomes mediocre). But it takes a big picture perspective to understand this; the Southern elite was more focused on their own interests rather than the rest of society’s. As long as all the power remained in their hands, slavey would likely have continued for a long time.
Right, because slaves were an asset that could be cashed in when the planter was in a bind. They were sold westward because that’s where the demand was highest. So it seems to me that the fact that this happened only supports my point. Slaves were a source of income, not liability.
The in-debtness of plantations wasn’t due to slavery; it was because planters eventually weren’t able to sell their crops at a price high enough to pay the overhead, due to competition and market forces. In other words, if the plantations owners had used wage labor in the fields instead of slaves, this same problem would have occurred.
I think there is a major difference between slavery as a work system and slavery as a social/economic system. I’ve seen it argued that simply as a work system it was very inefficient - lack of incentives to quality work etc.
However, obviously it was much more than that. In particular after the external slave trade was abolished, the importance of slaves as stores of value increases dramatically (as does the reproductive aspect of the whole system). So while slavery might not have been the most cost efficient method of picking cotton or planting rice, the other aspect ensured its continuation - a plantation owner’s wealth was so dramatically tied up in his slaves that he could not conceive of a different system.
Except it’s not clear that it was very self-perpetuating.
First off, the slave economy consumed capital; they did not generate it for the slaveholders. The only ones who I would say really did well were the cotton factors who lent money to the planter class.
It enabled that class to sometimes generate considerable wealth… and often not. Much of the planter class was steadily going broke by the Civil War - which is why they were rapidly selling slaves off to the west. It was happening slowly enough that new growth westward had covered it up - but it’s not at all clear that it could have survived at all without somehow expanding cotton cultivation into the Caribbean and South America. And the South knew that at the time, and was terrified of what would happen without that.
Not neccessarily, no. I am saying that slaveholding was a risky endeavor even for the individual. It carried potentially good returns but only in limited areas and only for a limited time. It could be quite profitable within that frame - but it is still not clear whether or not it really was profitable in the long-term. It probably seemed easy, or it may have appeared obviously profitable at the time, but the opportunity cost and risk was huge. The slave economy was chosen in large part because of cultural reasons, not neccessarily economic ones.
Let’s say that Amazon.com was never able to start generating a profit (and as it was, it took a riskily long time). It might, on the strength of high sales, be able to attract, borrow, and invest a lot of capital, and generate apparent wealth. However, if the firm never became long-term profitable, it will go out of business and crash hard. In that time, it can build a big fancy headquarters and look very respectable - but it is a fiscal disaster.
The slave planting culture itself may have been living on borrowed time. One major, massive issue to the intensive cotton cultivation was soil depletion. Slavery was kept afloat in much of the south essentially by being sold to new lands. I don’t mean to say free-soil labor, stuck in the exact same circumstance, would have done better. I do say that free-soil labor would not have formed the same economy.
Now, I’m not really going to post on this again. And in fact, you may be totally and completely right. To this day, people argue on the whole issue and there’s no clear answer and prolly never will be.
Yeah. In this aspect, slavery wasn’t even about labor. It was more like stock trading.
That’s why Kansas-Nebraska was such an issue. Cotton depletes the soil almost as bad as tobacco so people would settle in an area, raise cotton and rotate crops until the land was tapped out (usually a decade or maybe two if they had a large place) and then move on, usually west. By the 1850s they were “running out of west” and starting to look towards the Kansas and Nebraska area, and if they went there they wanted to be able to take their slaves. (Also there was the issue that if K-N were admitted as slave states that meant 4 more senators who represented slaveholders, congressional representation being another thing they were running out of).
Every schoolchild knows that George Washington Carver created 82 billion uses for the peanut (peanut butter not being one of them- in fact many of his uses were never practical or marketed) but they’re rarely taught the more important reason of why- it wasn’t because he was cuckoo for peanuts. By the early 20th century cotton had absolutely destroyed the soil of many areas of Alabama, the market had long been stagnate (farmers black and white were literally doing 4 times the work of their grandparents to get the same yield, if they were lucky enough to get that) and then on top of everything else the boll weevil was coming more frequently and wiping out what cotton was grown. (You can only imagine how disgusting and suicidally depressing it is to break your back for months and then through no fault of your own it’s gone- I don’t remember any of the old people in my family talking much about the advent of the car or electricity or any of the wars they lived through but they still talked of boll weevil years.) At the same time however there was no other crop banks would loan farmers money to grow in most areas.
Carver knew that the answer lay in some type of crop that grew just as well as cotton but did none of the damage to the soil. Peanuts were one of the early ones he considered because they actually restore nitrogen (the element most sapped by cotton) in soil and they grew like gangbusters in Alabama. The problem was that they were only used for food and the peanut farmers already grew more than enough to supply the demand for peanuts in the U.S. and in fact exported the crop. However, thought Carver, if we could find more uses we could create a larger market and that would encourage more farmers to grow them; in other words he was creating an artificial market.
Very few of the hundreds of uses he came up with for the peanut were practical and hardly any of them are still used today. (His most successful product were his cookbooks for more peanut recipes.) However, his creation of industrial lubricants were more successful than all of the rest of his creations combined and encouraged other research that really did greatly multiply the acreage planted in peanuts. Then he turned to soybeans, which got Henry Ford into the act- Carver’s work with soybeans is incomparably more important than his work with peanuts, so much so that the dyed-in-the-wool racist Ford offered him $100,000 (more than 10x his salary at Tuskegee) to come to work for him, though he turned him down.
I’ve always thought this was far more interesting than just saying "Number 231- Peanut shampoo, Number 232- Peanut conditioner, Number 233- Inflatable peanut woman, Number 234- Peanut ice cubes’, etc… He saved thousands of lives and thousands of farms by reversing some of the damage done by cotton and by creating a market for another crop, for which the white farmers of the mid 20th century referred to him affectionately from then on as “that nigger scientist at Tuskegee” (or at least that’s how he was referred to when I was a kid- by some of the people who were growing soybeans instead of cotton).
Can you explain this a little more? I’m not understanding how having cheap, self-reproducing labor would have left slaveowners with less wealth than they would have had without cheap, self-reproducing labor.
How much of this was due to the establishment’s overreliance on a one-crop economy to the exclusion of a more diversified industry? I guess you can blame slavery for this failure, but if you’re going to do that, then you could equally if not moreso blame the cotton jin. It still doesn’t makes sense to say the cotton jin caused the planter class to go broke, though. Being unhealthily dependent on cotton did. Slavery enabled that dependency but it didn’t cause it no more than Eli Whitney did.
When trying to make money in the South, I think the risks associated with owning slaves were far lower than not owning slaves. Especially if you were trying to run a plantation. At least a planter could sell his slaves if he went bankrupt. That eliminates a lot of risk right there. If a planter who used wage labor went bankrupt, he wouldn’t be able to sell anyone.
It’s a fiscal disaster when it crashes, sure. But prior to the time the money runs out, it’s not a disaster to the CEO if it’s allowing him to live in presitgious luxury. This is the case even if that prestigious luxury is bought on credit. That kind of credit is unavailable to people who aren’t CEO’s.
Furthermore, if Amazon did crash, I wouldn’t be quick to attribute that to its workforce.
I enjoyed hearing your view, even if I disagree with it.
On the subject of indebtedness, slaves were by far and away and without room for compare the most expensive property you had to pay cash for, so for that reason they were the reason most big planters had such heavy debtloads. Most were bought on credit; if you read the notes from auctions and auction houses they were rarely sold for cash on the barrelhead. If you were a planter you usually took a letter of credit to the auction and the terms would be specified in a manner like this (which is a slave transaction record I found doing genealogical research, misspellings intact):
I realize this may be boring to those who don’t like the mintuiae of history, but it puts you more into the mindset of the time. Jefferson Davis’s brother Joseph, one of the richest men in Mississippi, once bought 31 slaves site unseen from a Virginia estate liquidation for $18,000 (this was around 1850). The only cash paid by Davis, who did not attend the sale, was their price of transport and the $18,000 was a tentative price pending their survival of the journey in reasonable health.
Per the sales agreement the slaves were sent to Hurricane, Davis’s plantation in Mississippi. There they were examined by a doctor who found all but two to be healthy and those two to simply have “an ephemeral illness” (a cold or the like) thus they stood for the $18,000 purchase price. However, Davis’s bankers then (and this was allowed by the agreement) calculated that currency fluctuation between the date of purchase agreement a couple of months before and the value of currency between the Virginia bank holding the money for the sale and the Mississippi bank that was agreeing to the mortgage and other considerations (remember that the Federal government did not issue the paper currency of the time- the individual banks did- and their currency could fluctuate from day to day and bank to bank) so the amount was recast as about $16,400.
Now, even then the estate that Davis purchased these slaves from did not receive the cash, they received a bank letter from Davis’s bank which was basically an IOU saying that on x date (after harvest time) the cash would be paid and the bank guaranteed it (meaning that if Davis defaulted they’d still make good his loan and then go after him). The estate from which he was buying the slaves could, if they needed money faster, sell this letter at a loss or borrow money against it. I’m honestly not sure what the resolution was in this matter, but it’s very conceivable that if they needed cash badly enough and quickly enough (because few people- not even banks- had that much gold lying around) they might have liquidated this for $12,000 or whatever.
The reason I mention all this is to demonstrate how cash wasn’t then what it is now and debts and documents of debt could be used as cash. Joseph Davis, I am guessing, would have made this good- he was a brilliant businessman, but foreclosures were not at all uncommon. Because banks traded notes the way they did the failure of one major planter could also set off a chain reaction going that could topple a bank or two or three, at least until the estate could be liquidated.
Lehman Brothers, the evil giant that fell in the water on September 15, 2008 and caused some typhoons, began as a dry goods store in downtown Montgomery, Alabama in the 1850s. Because most farmers did not have much cash, they accepted cotton like it was currency or, if the cotton wasn’t done yet, they would extend X amount of credit in exchange for Y percent of the crop based on what they anticipated cotton prices would be that year and how much cotton that field could reasonably produce. They weren’t the only business that did this, but they were among the most successful. The Lehman brothers, being Bavarian Jews by birth, really didn’t have a vested interest in the region- they were in business here but “eh, it’s just a place”- so when Alabama seceded they sold their notes and took the small fortune they had amassed to join family in New York City where they opened a brokerage house. So, you can sort of see in the current economic fustercluck what the economics of debt were headed towards even then.
A working plantation may have had assets of a million dollars worth of slaves. And it might produce an annual income of $50,000. But its annual expenses were $51,000. So every year the owner operated the plantation he went deeper in debt.
Now compare him to somebody that didn’t own a plantation. This guy is incurring no debt so on paper he’s better off. But he has no assets and no annual income.
Racism was common North and South in the 19th century. For example, the 1851 Indiana Constitution, Article 13, Section 1 states,
No negro or mullatto shall come into or settle in the State…
I don’t think so. A cotton jin was just a machine and capable of being no more than that. Slaves were people, and capable of being far more than they were allowed to be. By engaging in slavery, they severely limited the kinds of industry they were capable of engaging in. As well, they damaged their economy by enforcing the existence of a large class of people who weren’t in the position to be the customers for much of anything; even if they somehow diversified their economy they crippled their own market. I think it was Ford who supposedly commented on his giving a raise to his workers, that if he didn’t pay them enough, how would they buy the cars his factory made?
They also as I said earlier suffered from progressive irrationality due to the need to defend an indefensible system. They weren’t cold blooded rationalists any more than modern people are; they wanted to believe they were the good guys.
But the difference is, Amazon doesn’t force its workforce to be as ignorant as possible. If Amazon forbid its workers to learn how to read, you probably would blame their choice of a workforce for their failure. The slavemasters set themselves up at the top of a workforce they deliberately intellectually and economically crippled, to keep them from being capable of rebellion and to extract as much labor for as little investment as possible. But since their wealth ultimately came from that workforce as the wealth of employers always does, they were in essence crippling their own economic potential along with that of the slaves. They managed to create the illusion of prosperity due to concentrating so much of the results of that labor at the top; but that didn’t make the system any less crippled.
Which goes to the damaging effects of slavery to society as a whole, but doesn’t speak to the costs supposedly incurred by individual slaveowners. That is what my point is about. Focusing on the cost required to buy, feed and house slaves, without figuring in the spending power that slaves generated to the individual makes little sense if the goal is to understand why slavery was unlikely to disappear (soon) without Union intervention. The only reason why these big ballers were even in the priviledged position to rack up so much debt was because of slaves. Poor people aren’t able to take out million dollar loans.
Only on paper was he better off. It’s highly likely such a man would be living in a tinroof shack eating corn pone and fighting off scurry or pellagra. While in the meantime, Massa and his kinfolk–despite being in debt–were living in the big house eating roast beef and biscuits, all courtesy of slaves. So who is really better off here?
Maybe capital and wealth are the wrong words to be using, but slaves certainly enabled these people to live a certain lifestyle that made having them worth the cost. Again, I’m speaking in terms of the individual. The cost to society is different.
Sounds like the joke that was made about, IIRC, Donald Trump: If you have 500 million dollars and you owe a billion dollars, are you rich or are you poor?
So slavery was in effect a gigantic bubble?
My understanding is that cotton became a bubble. It came crashing not so much because slaves were too expensive and inefficient but because year after year, less profit was to be made in cotton in an increasingly global market.
Not necessarily. It depended on many factors including where it was located and the business acumen of the manager. Some were highly profitable, others squeaked by. Obviously if the cash crops became too unprofitable then the wealth would have evaporated and banks would have stopped loaning money.
Natural disaster was a major factor of course. Natchez, MS was per capita the richest city in the U.S. during the late antebellum era (not that the average person was so wealthy but of course it was a plutocracy). One reason it accumulated such wealth was the Mississippi flooded often enough and largely enough (but not too largely) to refertilize some of the soil.
Just as with hurricanes today they were sitting on a time bomb. Just as some coastal regions might go 30 years without a particularly destructive then be struck twice in 5 years, Natchez went from annual minor flooding to several disastrous floods over a two decade period from the late 1850s to late 1870s. Had the Civil War never happened they’d have still been wiped out. While many large scale planters had some insurance as well, though then as now if there’s a major disaster insurance companies can go bust.
(Not that natural disasters are all that can bankrupt them. After the war Jefferson Davis became president of a life-insurance company that specialized in selling policies to Confederate veterans. Unfortunately actuarial specialists weren’t quite as advanced then and many of the veterans died prematurely from war injuries or yellow fever/typhoid epidemics that hit several places and they had to make a massive amount of payoffs, which when combined with the wild fluctuations in the stock market completely bankrupted them 5 years after they were founded.)
But the inefficiency and irrationality of slavery made that situation inevitable; they couldn’t diversify, they couldn’t compete. Rather like Communism that way I think; ideologically dedicated to a disastrous dead end system.
Well, maybe. The big issue with slaves was that you HAD to have a very profitable mass-scale use for them. They couldn’t take care of themselves because they weren’t even taught to read by and large. Thgus, the plantation owner or manager had to somehow find a worthwhile use for all his labor whether he wanted it or not, and could not readily devote it to any other purpose. Some slaves had trades, and some could be sold, but in a big Catch 22, they could only really be sold and traded within the areas of other people who used slaves for the same purposes. Plus, tradesmen were becoming elss valuable with the advent of industrial machinery and mass manufacturing - which was once again concentrated in the North.
Basically, slaves were not free to own, which you do seem to miss. It was not easy to get enough value out of them to pay for them in the long haul. This was one of the big problems with the region’s growth even until the mid-20th century: it was kneecapping a huge portion of its labor market.
Sure, they could reproduce. But that was a rather iffy long-term investment, which required food, clothing, and care along the way.
My point was that the slavery system was an economic dead-end even if some people in it were living well. The fact that they were living well was actually a negative because it discouraged them from looking at the larger economic picture. Instead of figuring out ways to divest themselves of their slaves and plantations and move their capital into better investments, the owners seemed determined to ride their plantations off the economic cliff.