I tend to think early abolitionist movements are somewhat overstated by many.
They were successful in the north, where abolition had little practical effect. And a remarkable number of Founding Father’s were very outspoken about believing slavery was immoral and should be abolished. What is more remarkable is that the overwhelming majority of them never really touched on the issue of slavery in the South. Jefferson is a prime paradoxical fixture, there’s tons of support for the idea that he was morally opposed to slavery, but he himself owned many slaves.
Men like Franklin, Burr, Hamilton, and Benjamin Rush were active in abolishing slavery throughout the North, where slavery had never truly taken hold or become a serious issue. Yet throughout the period of the early revolution and up until the 1830s/1840s when William Garrison became prominent you don’t see any serious efforts by Northern politicians to actually strike at the institution of slavery in the South.
I think you’d have to regard a petition signed by Benjamin Franklin and fiercely debated by Congress a serious effort. (I again recommend the Ellis book.)
It is however fair to say that the issue was dropped after that, and a strained silence on the subject prevailed for some time thereafter. That is not the same as saying slavery wasn’t an issue. It was an issue – just an issue that was too hot to handle, as the Franklin petition had revealed. No one in that first generation of politicians was willing to provoke a sectional crisis that might destroy the Union.
While I was impressed by most of your post, I was surprised by this bit. It’s the complete opposite of what I understood as the truth.
As I understood it, the main economic reason for slavery in the cotton plantations was that cotton production was highly labour intensive but the product, cotton, could not be sold at a great profit. If you had to employ lots of people in the fields, and weren’t making much money, it made sense for your “employees” to be slaves, who you didn’t have to pay. Once the cotton gin came along it became possible to run a plantation at a larger profit with far fewer workers - a single gin could do the work of hundreds of slaves. After the cotton gin was invented, the South had to justify slavery on religious/racial grounds; the gin had knocked the stuffing out of the economic argument.
I wonder if it was more expensive to own slaves than hire free workers. On one hand, you don’t have to pay wages for a slave, but you did need to shelter, feed, clothe, and even take care of the slave’s dependents (children and older folks).
Whereas, with a free worker, you could just pay a wage and care less about what he does outside work.
Was taking care of slaves more expensive than paying laborers?
Washington (to name one prominent example) did complain about the cost of providing for slaves. Washington was reluctant to break up families, but that meant that the slave population at Mt. Vernon grew beyond the number actually needed to work the plantation. Washington once observed the large number of idle slaves on his plantation and wondered (callously, when you think about it) whether the slaves were working for him, or he was working for the slaves.
Yet, sharecropping (i.e., freeing the slaves and letting them work for a share of the crop) seems not to have occurred to the big slaveowners.
One problem is that slaves were often subject to a mortgage. (They were regarded as property, after all.) You can’t free what doesn’t fully belong to you.
Then too, slaves had great value, so I imagine simple greed played its part. An average slave cost $1,658 in 1856-60. (Maybe about $20,000.00 in today’s money.) Even if you were of a mind to free your slaves and set them up as sharecroppers, you would be taking a big financial chance that they would stick around.
Did they take care of older slaves, or just kill them ? That seems more likely to me, but I don’t really know. For that matter, I’d expect them to use the bodies of dead slaves for leather products, soap, and such, like the Nazis, or the British in Tasmania.
They still needed slaves to plant and pick the cotton, as well as to perform the many other tasks necessary to run a plantation–weeding, plowing, fence and building maintenance, care and feeding of draft animals, and on and on . . .
No. Nobody held slaves against their better interests just to make a racial point. Slavery was profitable for slave owners, and they developed racial and religious justifications partly to assuage their own consciences and partly to defend the institution against outside objection.
It depends. If it were always one way or always the other, either every farm in the country would have had slaves, or none would.
Enslaving a person entails high fixed cost but low variable cost. You either have to claim a mother’s child at the moment of birth and pay to raise it from babyhood, which involves upfront cost, or you have to buy a person, which effectively requires you to pay for a lifetime of labor in advance. But once you’ve done that, you don’t have to pay wages (other than food and minimal housing and clothing). On the other hand, the labor you get in return for that low cost won’t be as productive per hour as free labor, since you’ll have a thoroughly demotivated work force. On the other other hand, you can coerce more hours out of slaves–as many as their bodies can physically tolerate.
The trade-off between free and slave labor had a lot of variables, but people are very good at calculating their own self-interest, and you can be pretty sure that wherever masters owned slaves, they were better off for doing so. The society as a whole might not be better off, and the slaves certainly weren’t, but the masters were.
Oh for pity’s sake. Spare us the silly speculations, please. This subject has enough controversy without trying to create more out of whole cloth.
Slaves were not killed off when they got old. If you think about it, a slaveholder wants to keep the peace on his plantation, and wants to discourage runaways. Killing off granny is not going to serve either of those ends.
Right. I was questioning whether it was more expensive to provide food, housing, clothing, and even medical care* than to just pay a laborer a wage?
with the cost of a slave upwards of $20,000 (from an earlier post), you’d have an incentive to keep the slave healthy and productive. Whereas with a laborer, you could just hire another to replace the laborer.
This is Great Debates, Der Trihs. Don’t speculate, provide evidence. A simple Google search of “slave burials” or “elderly slaves” would have answered your questions and spared the rest of us your lurid fantasies of slaveskin leather and slavesoap.
I think it’s important not to confuse the issue with quesitons like: Would there have been a civil war if slavery hadn’t existed. If that had been the case, the US would have been a very different country, possibly one without all of the 13 original colonies and without some of the states added later. Sure, there very well could have been a civil war over secession but it probably would’ve been at a different time and had different actors.
The flash point was slavery, and the different economies that resulted because of it, as well as the differences over slavery itself. Slavery was the sine qua non of The Civil War as it actually played out in real history.
And you’re right about that. Which makes one suspect that these practices were not as common as abolitionist literature suggested. One must be careful about accepting propaganda uncritically, even when that propaganda is generated in the interest of a noble end.
Besides, how many elderly sleves were there to kill off in the first place? If you were a typical free White person in the mid 1800s, your life expectancy was what-- 45?
I wouldn’t question the common occurance of rape or even selling off of family members, but people just didn’t live that long back then, and if you were a slave, you lived even fewer years.
What’s so “lurid” about it ? It’s not like other groups with similar attitudes haven’t done the same.
Or that those plantations weren’t all that peaceful, and were controlled by terror tactics.
A slaveowner isn’t likely to care about “peace”. He wants profit, and he wants power. The power to rape and torture and kill, for fun and profit. No one owns slaves unless they are a monster.
And yes, I’m well aware of how common slavery was historically.
People simply aged faster. They didn’t work from dawn to dusk every day until 30 and drop over, after all; they were worn down. 45 was elderly.
It’s hard to say. Certainly, the lowest wage-earners in Northern society didn’t have much left over after feeding, housing, and clothing themselves and their families, so at first glance the cost (to hire or to enslave) should be similar. But, slave owners can economize–they can buy food and clothing wholesale, for example. They can and did skimp on quality. They don’t have to pay premiums for overtime or undesirable forms of work, subject only to the constraint that it isn’t in their interest to permanently destroy their captives’ health. In general, once you’ve enslaved a person, it’s cheaper.
Regarding elderly slaves, the first point to be emphasized is that there weren’t many. Fogel and Engerman reported a life expectancy (at birth) of 36 for slaves and 40 for Nineteenth Century American whites. Among those who did reach “old age”, I know of no documented instance of such a person being killed. Some work could usually be wrung out of all but the most incapacitated individuals; for example, elderly women often cared for children. However, Frederick Douglass tells how one of his masters dealt with a crippled slave:
I agree with others, Der Trihs - there’s no evidence that elderly slaves were murdered (as John pointed out there weren’t that many slaces who were too old to work). Slavery was immoral in enough real ways that there’s no need to make up stories about it.
The cotton gin did make slavery a much sounder economic practice. But cotton production also had a major drawback - a decade or two of cotton planting would deplete the soil. By the 1860’s, former major cotton production areas like Virginia and the Carolinas could no longer produce. So the switched to a new product - many plantations in the mid-Atlantic region were successfully breeding and exporting slaves to the states in the Mississippi region which had been settled later and where the cotton fields were still producing. But slave owners of the Old South realized their long-term economic well-being required access to a continuous expansion of slave-based agricultural territory as their market. This was the reason that arguments over slavery laws in the western territories was so devisive - it was not just a symbolic or political issue to the slave owners back East.
Life expectancy at birth can be a misleading statistic, though, because it’s brought down by high rates of infant mortality. Assuming the 19th century individuals survived childhood, their average life expectancy goes way up.
Outright terror on slave plantations was rare. It’s remarkably ineffective, for one thing. And while it went on, it wasn’t the norm. The horror of slavery wasn’t the gross abuses. It was the casual dehumanization and justification of exploitation.
Most of them owned slaves because they wanted to make a profit, of course, but also because they grew up in a society where it was accepted, and because they developed a twisted sense of values that said that holding slaves was a moral good.