In the ante-bellum era, maybe. But once again, would have there been any significant economy in the South to hold back if during the previous centuries, there hasn’t been slaves, and as a result no large scale agricultural production?
IOW, isn’t it the case that slavery allowed the prosperity of the south even though at some point (when industrialization began) it became an hindrance?
It makes sense that preceding the Civil War that slavery would have been not as economical as it should have been. In general, economical matters don’t become strongly contested until their existence is questionable. But that’s up to a hundred years after the time leading up to the Revolution.
Slaves do inferior work. They don’t have the money to consume much, so aren’t a market themselves either. And in the long run the practice tends to corrupt society so that the free people avoid more and more labor that smacks of “slave’s work”. A society that avoids labor saving technology because then they’d have less use for slaves, and over time they’ve convinced themselves with their self-justifications that having slaves is a necessity. The result ? A society with a few wealthy slaveowners, but one which in general in impoverished. A society with a cap on what it can achieve. The Old South, in other words. Or ancient Greece.
The fact is, the South did WORSE economically than the North - not in spite of slavery, but because of it. Slavery crippled them. This was known even back then; they knew that slavery was economically less efficient.
Rome actually ran into similar problems. Eventually a slave based economy is a losing proposition even if initially it seems to jump start things in a colonial environment.
-XT
I think its important to remember that prior to the Revolution, the South was really only Virginia, the Carolinas, and Georgia, and Georgia had a pretty tiny population. So when we talk about the other Southern states we are only really talking about the ante bellum era, as it was the drive west to expand cotton growing lands that largely led to the growth of those states (with exceptions like New Orleans of course).
As to the question of what would have happened to the original Southern states, it’s difficult to say. Remember, Virginia went for its first 60 or so years with primarily indentured labor before switching to slaves for a variety of reasons. So it’s theoretically possible, at least, that they could have done it without slavery. As said up thread, around the time of the Constitution, slavery in the Old South was already unprofitable and thought to be dying out.
The thing is, I do wonder whether anyone but Africans with their autoimmune advantages would be able to handle the labor required for plantation agriculture in the South. The Native Americans certainly couldn’t and the mortality rate for immigrants to Virginia in the 1600’s was obscene.
The American South had an agricultural economy in the 18th century that never would have prospered but for slavery. They depended on slaves to work the plantations tending to very labor intensive crops …tobacco, cotton, peanuts, sugar. No way could those plantations have survived without slave labor or modern equipment.
I don’t know how accurate the attached is, but it’s an interesting read on Slavery & the American Economy.
“The results of the economic value of this free labor are, when inflated conservatively at 3% to 2006 dollars, a staggering value of 20.3 trillion dollars or to put this number in a more visual perspective; it amounts to $563,450 per African American currently living in the US”
Ummm. Because no agricultural economy has ever worked without slavery ? :rolleyes:
Look. One could make an argument that they would never have been able to pay the workers well. But that’s not at all the same as slavery. And I think you reverse causation; they didn’t have slavery because they had an agricultural economy; they were stuck with an agricultural economy because of slavery.
Which actually is an answer to my question, because essentially you say that without slaves and the accompanying cotton growing, most southern states wouldn’t have existed at all. So the question of knowing whether they would have been more or less prosperous without slavery is moot.
Basically, that’s what I was hinting at. Without slavery, the economy doesn’t collapse, but only because you don’t have an economy to begin with.
However, you mentioned that anyway the population was low, even with slavery. One would then assume, that without it, it would be at best identical, even in the states that would exist, and likely lower (not even counting the high death rate you also mention).
So, couldn’t the case be made that without slavery, the southern states would only have begun to develop and be populated after the industrialization. After, say, 1850?
That’s not true. We have seen that western expansion was much more effective and faster in the northern (well, Old Northwestern) states. Yes, in history, the southern states only expanded westward because of slavery. But without slavery, they’d have had much more reason to expand. They lacked expansionist drive for other agriculture and the immigrants to sustain it because of slavery. Some were atracted to the opportunity, but it generally made the South less interesting to immigrants and gave them fewer opportunities to find work quickly.
I don’t agree. One of the main export products manufactured in the North (as part of triangular trade) were textiles, and the North needed the cotton that was produced in the South to manufacture those textiles. Since raising cotton was so labor intensive, the labor was the principle expense in raising cotton. Over a period of a slave’s life, the labor he or she produced made the investment worth while.
The Civil War wasn’t just about slavery in and of itself. If the South were a separate nation it could impose tariffs on cotton sold to the North which would drive the price up for the North. Also, without slavery, freed slaves would come North and at least be able to work for money, even though it would be less than what white factory workers would make.
I agree that towards the end, the existence of slavery helped keep agriculture going to the exclusion of other industries in the south.
But to say the South was stuck with agriculture because of slaves is to ignore the fact that without the cash crop demand in the first place, there would have been little incentization for slavery. Initially slavery was practiced in the North and South, but it eventually lost its foothold in the North not because the yankees didn’t want to get saddled with an agrarian economy…but because slavery wasn’t a very efficient labor source for the economy that evolved there. In the South, the story was different.
I agree that cotton was important to the textile mills of the north, which I alluded to in my post. But they weren’t as an important source of cotton as they thought they were as evidenced by the cotton embargo on England.
Oh, and the triangle trade was more of a colonial thing as the importation of slaves became illegal after 1820.
British textile mills arguably relied heavily on American cotton. An interesting corollary to the OP’s question would be to wonder whether the absence of slavery in the American South would have delayed or harmed the development of the Industrial Revolution in the UK.
It was, but as a result of the embargo was ultimately replaced by Egypt and India.
DeToquville was startled to see how much worse the economy was in slave states than just across rivers in non-slave states. Slavery was pretty bad for the economy. Now blacks have contributed mightily to our country. Look up Elijah McCoy or George Washington Carver just to start. You could spend a lifetime cataloging just famous achievements.
The answer to bar bigots is: “that’s disgusting” and walk away, spill your drink and don’t come back. If you just leave the drink he will drink it, which was probably his objective if it turned out you weren’t a bigot who bought him one.
Through chance, the Old South depended on two big crops that required a LOT of hand labor to grow and harvest (tobacco and cotton). Cheap slave labor made the plantation owners rich, but depressed wages for the poor white southerners. It also kept the south locked into the plantation system-which is why there was no money for education, or industry, or anything else. Which is why the second sons of planters wound up in either the ministry or the military-and the South decayed. The breaking point came when the new western lands opened up-but the abolitionists prevented slavery from being extended to the new territories-hence, the Civil war