So I’m up at the bar today when somehow I get myself in a conversation with a bigot who seemed to be of the opinion that “Blacks” owe us (white people) because they’re here now and they get to live a good life thanks to us (again White people) who founded the good ol’ U.S of A."
Annoyed, I then spout off to him “Ya’ know had it not been for those Black folks, the American economy would have collapsed a long time ago. Reason being, we had an abundance of agriculture and nobody to work the fields.”
I’ll admit at the time I spouted off something as fact with out actually doing the research. Mostly because I was annoyed with said bigot.
So now I ask in retrospect; does my above statement have any validity to it?
I’m sure it helped. If the colonials hadn’t been feeling pretty secure financially, they probably wouldn’t have been in as much of a revolutionary mood. They wouldn’t have been buying slaves if slaves didn’t turn a decent profit. (In the same way that we wouldn’t be using Chinese labor if it didn’t make us a profit.)
But I don’t think the economy would have collapsed or anything. More likely is that it would have taken longer for them to become prosperous enough to care about splitting off, and by that time the Natural Rights movement might have passed. So we might all still be monarchists under the United Kingdom.
I wouldn’t say that early America would have collapsed, not by any means. As history has it, slavery was becoming less favorable because of the huge influx of immigrants. More labor was readily available and very cheap. That is until the wonderful invention that Eli Whitney brought to the American farming industry. This invention brought a prosperous production to cotton harvest. But that didn’t mean it made the work any more easy. It increased harvest from hundreds of thousands of pounds to millions and millions in a single harvest. So, having said that, even immigrants who were being paid, weren’t being paid enough to work in the Cotton fields, so slavery regained popularity and blacks, and immigrants of other nationalities that were being paid, found themselves working off alleged debts that were unpayable.
Would Americas early economy collapse without blacks…no. It may have taken a different route, new inventions may have possibly arisen to meet production. But, slavery of any race of that time did make its contributions.
Maybe it would not have collapsed if it had been already on the rails, but would have it started, though?
I know essentially nothing about the economics of early America, I mean during the 17th and 18th centuries, but would a significant number of people have immigrated there, would have it been in any way prosperous enough, if it hadn’t produced the kind of agricultural products that required the work of slaves?
Is it conceivable that without slaves and the accompanying productions, at the time the American Revolution occurred in reality, it could have been a backward colony of the British Crown, with barely any population, and barely any economic significance?
Good question. This again can only be through personal speculation, especially of my limited knowledge of this era.
Between the early 1600’s and 1800’s, there was a serious contribution to Americas economy through the sale and purchase of slaves. As much as I hate to state this. But, the fact of the matter is, slaves biggest economical contribution to America was probably the fact that the lives of slaves did have value in terms of money, and the money was getting good. Not to disregard the contribution of their slave labor of blood, sweat and lives. But, by the time slavery was at it’s peek, some where between 1850-1870, slavery was supposedly abolished. I do know that the legal importation of slavery ceased in the very early 1808’s.
What’s profitable for the individual isn’t necessarily good for the economy as a whole, and slavery was a net drag on the economy. It lasted because the slaveowners made a profit from it, not because it was more profitable for the nation as a whole than free people doing work instead.
Slavery is a luxury; an indulgence of the slaveowners. Not a necessity, or even a benefit to anyone else. I don’t think it’s a coincidence that slavery became widespread with the appearance of agriculture - settled, agricultural societies are richer than nomads, and could support the dead weight of slavery.
I believe this may be different though. Those other countries you mention had time to adjust to there agricultural growth. America didn’t; their exponential growth exceeded their labor force.
The northern United States also did fine with very limited slavery, because it’s like the other regions–with a mild climate attractive to immigrants and suitable to small-scale agriculture.
The Southern United States, and much of the Americas between Virginia and Brazil, were different. The brutal climate was much less attractive to free immigrants, especially if they had to do their own manual labor. The land proved better suited to large-scale plantation agriculture, to which it would have been virtually impossible to attract free white labor.
I dare say the southern US would have filled up eventually without slave labor, but it would have done so much more slowly, and been less prosperous, because less able to specialize in sugar and cotton.
That’s not completely true. In 19th-century Queensland there was use of “indentured” South Sea Islanders in sugar-cane production. Although it was called “indentured”, many were in fact kidnapped from Melanesia and treated the same as slaves. Part of the reason was difficulty in finding Europeans to work in the tropical climate.
But I agree that “collapsed” is putting it too strongly: it might have progressed more slowly, but human ingenuity tends to find a way around problems. It’s just that, in the Southern United States and in Queensland, slavery was seen as the best solution to the problem. Without those slaves, another solution would have been found.
That makes no sense. When ever has bottom of the barrel cheap labor been a drag on the economy? If you’re contending that it always is, I’m going to have that apparatus explained to me. If you’re saying that it only was in this instance, again, I’m going to have you say more than that it “is so.”
It would have simply slowed the growth of the Southern states and probably changed the economic equation. But no, America wouldn’t have collapsed but for ‘free’ black slavery. What I wonder about is the slavery leg of the trade triad equation. What would have replaced that leg in the trade routes? No one was going to send out ships with no cargo after all. I think that would have been a more significant change than having no slaves in North America.
It’s pretty universally accepted by historians that slavery held back the growth of the South in the ante bellum era. This is for a couple of reasons. For one slavery kept the South dependent on cash crops. Another reason is that slaves were by far plantation owners’ biggest capital investment. In fact, most had so much of their money tied up in their slaves that they were actually indebt to Northern and British merchants.
Also, it’s important to remember that the South really wasn’t that important to the United States as a whole, especially in the period leading up to the Civil War. The South was not densely populated, had few cities, and as I mentioned, mainly only produced one or two staple crops. The mass of the U.S.'s population was in the North, and the western states and territories were where most of the country’s food was comming from.
That said, there is no question that the United States as a whole profited from commerce that was in some way connected to slavery (northen textile mills, trade with the Carribean, etc.), but I don’t see the elimination of slavery in the South hurting the country, it certainly didn’t hurt the Northern states when they abolished slavery.
This is an interesting question. In the 1700’s and early decades of the 1800’s a large amount of the North’s commerce was with the Carribean Islands. This trade certainly played a significant role in the growth and evolution of the Northern economy. But, I think its tough to know what would have happened without it, because really the whole Atlantic world, including England, was heavily invested in it. So you can’t consider a change to any one place without considering the change to everywhere else too.
I was reading some history on Patrick Henry, and he discussed at one point whether allowing Southern European immigrants in would be preferable to slavery. The risk was letting in the Catholics, vs. the high numbers of Africans.
But the only reason the planters were capable of buying slaves was because of slaves. Slaves were not an “outlay” as you’re presenting them as. They were an investment that paid dividends.
I want to expand on these remarks, whch are very accurate.
Slavery in the south was profitable in some places. Mostly in the western South: the states around the Mississippi. Louisiana, Arkansas, Missisppi herself, western Tennessee, and parts of Missouri. Cotton and Sugar there was very profitable but extremely capital-intensive. It was not so in Virginia, or North and South Carolina, or most of Georgia and East Tennessee. Slavery died out or never took root in several areas, while others limpted along.
Many plantation owners (again, particularly in the east) had essentially no real source of income and lived on debt, because plantations there were not profitable. And, to be fair, plantation life was probably easier there - the image of a comfortable, easy life for black and white alike was not totall false. It just left out the cruel life most led, or that even the lucky few were poorly-fed and housed and clothed and could be sold anywhere and seperated from family at the whim of another. (Even I am not sure how sarcastic that sentence is or should be.) The owners led their life because of social reasons, and many invested what they had in western ventures.
At the same time, the balance of wealth and population and indusry were moving steadily North and West. The nation really had many distinct sections in the 19th century - Northeast, Deep South, Upper South, Border States, Midwest (or Old Northwest), and the vast and little-settled West. And even these were very complicated and conflicted. But the Old Northwest and West were definitely where the future lay. Southern states kept busy trying to hinder there expansion. Maps tend to hide this, because it looks on paper as if the SOuth and North were both exapnded westward. This was not so. Texas and Missippi and Missouri and Arkansas had small white American populations, and Louisiana was of course a French colony incorporated into the U.S.
The big use of Cotton and Sugar was to increase gold imports (in the form of specie) into the United States. However, the plantation economy was fundmentally a social construct more than a rational, cold-eyed solution. The South might have been much wealthier with a balanced industrial/agricultural economy, and with more efficient labor use. It didn’t go in for that because it fundamentally wasn’t as interested in it. Southerners really liked the rural life. And this is OK; the problem came because they started getting jealous and defensive over their relative lack of wealth conpared to other regions, and concluded they were being robbed or cheated somehow.