I disagree that this was inevitable. I think people make this assumption because that is the way South happened to have evolved up to the point of the Civil War, but its clear to me that had planters hired poor whites rather than enslaved blacks, the basic arithmetic remains unchanged. The profitability of cotton in the wake of the cotton jin left plantation owners with little incentive to diversify beyond cash crops. It was only after years of “king” cotton, that it started becoming a money-loser. Planters were caught unprepared because they’d put all their eggs in that one basket.
They hadn’t diversified not because they were irrational, but because they had had little reason to do so.
I mentioned on a St. Patrick’s Day post and on facebook yesterday that there’s a kinship twixt my feelings for southerners and Brendan Behan’s feelings for the Irish. Behan acknowledged how influential Ireland was in shaping him, there was much he loved in Irish culture, he felt they were more sinned against than sinning, but he also said “If it were raining soup they’d be running out with forks”, and I feel similarly about Southerners. I am southern, it’s more than incidental in shaping who I am, warts and all I think it’s a fascinating and in many ways admirable heritage, and sometimes the general southern attitudes make me want to bang my head against a wall.
One of my favorite commentaries on southerners (white southerners anyway) is from Gone With the Wind. For those who haven’t read the novel, Grandma Fontaine is a plantation mistress, formerly rich as Croesus but her fortunes depleted by the war of course, but unlike most of the gentry- including her own family- she’s seen it all and has a “Meh, you think Civil War and Reconstruction’s bad? Try living through the Creek Wars and seeing your brothers and sisters killed by Indians, that was bad- this is a setback”. Here she tells a very pregnant Scarlett (at Scarlett’s father’s funeral) her view of white southerners:
While the whole point of that passage was probably meant to be more of a “When you’re down and out/lift up your head and shout/Fuck Y’all!” pep talk from Margaret Mitchell (writing during the Great Depression when the south was still segregated everywhere and there were still old timers like Granny Fontaine who could remember the Civil War and its aftermath, I think it has a lot of truth in it, though not all positive.
Southerners have backed every wrong horse in history, it’s part of our culture. It’s surprising so many fought on the U.S. side in the Revolution. The history has also been a lot bloodier than most- or at least bloodier a lot more recently than most- and people had to be very stubborn and hard to survive.
The downside is this is that *as a rule *(as always when speaking in social generalities, on the individual level all bets are off) southerners (especially- but not exclusively- white southerners) hate change or transition of any kind. The “bow to the inevitable” is another way of saying “survivors who can change with the times… but only after getting the living hell beaten out of them”, which of course reenforces the whole “change is bad” thing because change is associated with getting a big asswhipping.
Relevance to this: it’s another reason I don’t think slavery ever would have ended or that total dependance on cotton in so many areas ever would have ended on its own. There was some Roman ideal or saying that translated loosely “Tomorrow should be like today which should be like yesterday”- i.e. stasis=virtue, and that was evident in 1861, in 1955, and to a large degree (I would even say an increasing degree over past years) it is evident now. (The region has always been conservative- conservativism=no change after all- but with the election of Obama the conservatives have gone frigging insane down here; I know people who weren’t even religious before 2008 who now believe Obama’s the anti-Christ.)
Had it not been for air conditioning making factory and large scale office jobs possible and the Civil War and Civil Rights having been clear and undeniable defeats for the white southern establishment, I’ve little doubt that the fields would look like Afghanistan, and those who could afford it would, were they able, have taken their slaves to Hawaii and Alaska, but the rest would be here planting cotton in the sand.
Ostensibly no one would buy them if the demand for mass-scale labor wasn’t there. This is like saying the big issue with hiring a painting crew is that you have to have walls for them to paint. Yes, this is true. But it’s not as if the crew is going to show up at your door uninvited, leaving you desperately scrambling to find work for them.
If he couldn’t find use for this labor, he could sell them, lease them, or not buy them in the first place. Or kill them, give them to a relative, or at least discourage them from making babies. So I’m not all that convinced the struggle to find worthwhile use for all his labor was much of a struggle at all. Consider how many resources were put into tracking down run away slaves and the costs that slaves could bring at auction. Maybe in a few situations it was how you described, but to speak as if this was the case generally is wrong.
Do you have any cites to back this up? Because if this was the case, I’d expect the average slave to cost hardly anything at auction. I would also expect a woman of childbearing age to be among the least desirable commodities, and not one of the most prized as was the case. Why would it cost so much to purchase a slave if getting value out of them was so difficult? If there was a glut of non-value added labor on these farms, why haven’t I been able to find any evidence of this glut spilling over into the auction blocks?
How much do you think it cost to a feed and clothe your typical slave? It’s not like they were eating Virginia hams every Sunday and wearing silk. Chitterlings are cheap, especially when the slave himself is the one responsible for raising the hog, butchering it, and dressing the carcass.
But they would have been capable of finding alternatives, without slavery. With slavery, they were crippled. They were limited by their need to justify slavery only to an economy compatible with slavery. They were forbidden to even try to solve their problems, because doing so would mean admitting that slavery was a bad idea. It’s not like that is unique behavior; I go back to my comparison with Communism. They were ideologically shackled to a disastrous and immoral system, and therefore couldn’t even seriously try to solve their problems because the solutions that could work were all ideologically unacceptable.
This is commonly believed, but I don’t think it is very well supported. What it does is help perpetuate the myth that slaveowners were helplessly befuddled fools who were just trying to eke a live and got in over their heads, the poor things. As opposed to enabling us to see them as the exploitative plutocrats that they truly were.
Does the availability of cheap, plentiful migrant labor in southern California prevent businessmen in the region from diversifying beyond produce? Of course not. As long as crops are making them money, farmers will stick with what works. If crops stop being profitable, then farmers will have no choice but to come up with alternative schemes. And there is no reason to believe the same migrant workers used in the fields can’t be plugged into other rackets (like sweatshops). The same applies to the Southern elite and their slaves.
The fact that slaves were used successfully as iron workers, coal miners, and workers in chemical plants in places like North Carolina and Virginia suggests that when alternative business opportunities were recognized and pursued, slave labor worked just fine. Of course, societal attitudes did lead many to believe that the inherent stupidity of black folk would prevent them from making good factory workers, and that there would be all kinds of civil unrest if they let the slaves loose in the cities. But when the need for industrialization actually arose, history shows that these attitudes suddenly stopped mattering. Case in point, the industrial boom created by the Civil War.
Slavery was practiced for more than three centuries in the U.S. Something like this doesn’t last that long for purely irrational reasons.
There were also soldiers who deserted or threatened to when the Emancipation Proclamation was read, saying they weren’t going to risk their life to free slaves, and of course the NYC draft riots resulted in the deaths and beatings of many black New Yorkers for much the same sentiment. Most northerners were neither passionately anti-slavery or racially egalitarian by any means.
The reason Massachusetts became the first slave free colony (not the first colony to prohibit slavery [that would be, ironically, Georgia- didn’t last long obviously] but the first to truly across-the-board emancipate its slaves- was not due to any particular social qualms but rather the abolitionist sentiments of an individual.
In 1780 Mum Bett, a slave in Sheffield, received a beating from her mistress when she tried to stop her from beating her sister [by some accounts her niece]. It wasn’t her first beating but it was the one that made her say ‘enough is by God enough’ and she went to visit Theodore Sedgewick, a lawyer and abolitionist and, ironically, a friend of her master and asked his help in receiving her freedom. He took her case pro-bono and challenged the legality of slavery under Massachusetts law, which was easy to do because that same year Massachusetts had adopted a new constitution with the following:
There is some belief this was intentionally worded in that way by opponents of slavery who knew they could never put a slavery prohibition statute in and that Sedgewick and other abolitionists were looking for a test case was being sought, and there’s probably validity to that, but whatever the case Mum Bett was it. The case was Brom and Bett vs. Ashley (Brom was Bett’s husband). Not only was it ruled that per MA law she was free but she was awarded punitive damages for her beatings and backwages from her 21st birthday to the present (when she was about 30) for herself and her husband. Ironically her master and mistress asked her to remain in their employ for wages but she refused, going instead to work for Sedgewick.
Understandably this opened a floodgate of petitions for emancipation. Many conservatives wanted to amend the Constitution to make it clear that did not apply to slaves, but it was a no-go. This led to freedom for all slaves in Massachusetts.
Mum Bett (Mum was basically like ‘mammy’- an occupational title of sorts) changed her name to Elizabeth Freeman, the surname to reflect the new status of her and her husband. (Freeman would be a popular surname for blacks after the Civil War as well.) One of her granddaughters married the freed illegitimate son of a mulatto Haitian planter and slaveowner who had come to the U.S. after the Revolution; his name was Alexandre du Bois. One of their grandsons was William Edward Burghardt (W.E.B.) DuBois.
There’s no contradiction between being an exploitative plutocrat and being a fool. In fact, it’s common.
Religions are even more irrational, and have in some cases lasted for millennia. Same goes for racism and sexism; they’ve lasted for centuries and millennia, respectively despite being irrational. All it lasting three centuries means, is that it wasn’t irrational enough to destroy them in less than three centuries. And I never said that it was purely irrational ( it’s not like they were enslaving people because the slithy toves gyred and gimbled and made them do it ).
I didn’t say he was anything. But yes, the oft-repeated assertions that slavery hurt slaveowners and crippled their opportunites and left them in debt only serves to make these people look like hapless victims.
But calling it irrational as a blanket statement masks the starring roles played by capitalism and greed. It leads to the crazy notion that slaves posed a significant financial strain on their caretakers (i.e. slaveowners), which then gives way to the even crazier notion that planters were doing black folks a favor. Both of these are distortions that frustrate honest discussions about our country’s history.
The "plight"of the slaveowner is no different than the “plight” of the cocaine kingpin who pays his workers peanuts and lets them risk life and limb in defense of his territory, while he sits back and rakes in all the profits. The “plight” of the slaveowner is no different than the “plight” of the billionaire insurance executive who would rather someone die than make less than a billion in profit.
That is to say, not a “plight” at all, when everything is objectively considered.