Jack was writing fiction, and to the extent that there was a real basis, this was something he did for a short while rather than a long term necessity.
Don’t get me wrong: I love a lot of his work. But he did often adjust facts to suit his narrative…
By 1880 sharecropping allowed cotton to rebound, but again, that is a source of cheap unskilled labor, that in the USA just did not exist without slavery- and later freed slaves. So , yes, if all the slaves were freed before the Civil war (which then would not occur) sharecropping could take over - due to all that unskilled cheap labor. Mechanical cotton pickers came about in the 1940’s.
I was referring to the period after Whitney’s gin was introduced in 1793, hence 18th century. Despite schoolbooks, machinery did not make an immediate difference. About 30 years were needed for the change to percolate through the South. Rice and indigo were the two leading exports from the South in the 18th century.
Stats shall you have. This chart on annual cotton production on Statista shows the nearly flat production from 1792 to 1822, the tenfold growth from then to the Civil War, and then a resumption of prewar levels in 1876 and another tripling of growth during the next half century. Most production turned to cheaper and better cottons in other countries after the Depression, but greatly increased efficiency in the U.S. meant that it has more or less the same output from one-fourth the acreage.
So this is correct. Sharecroppers were treated barely better than slaves and far worse than any northern counterparts. Of course, technology improved in that half century as well, with steam-powered equipment for processing being especially important.
For starters, I assume that @Darren_Garrison 's mother and grandmother, mentioned in post 3, weren’t slaves. I expect that they probably didn’t have great working conditions, and they were probably underpaid, but they were still free.
No, here-
Yes, it was a hard life, but they could not be sold or beaten and their children were free.
Yes, but in order to pick cotton back then, a Southern farmer needed a lot of cheap labor. From the early 1800’s to 1865 he got that from slaves, then after that from freed slaves, working as sharecroppers. That reservoir of cheap labor was only there due to slavery and the 3 million now freed slaves.
If they needed to they could have paid the workers more. The Southern state governments could have subsidized doing so if necessary, even, much as they supported slavery (to the point of war, literally). They just didn’t want to, since they were willing to spend money and effort to hurt people, but unwilling to do so to help them. Slavery was always more about malice and dominance than it was about profit.
Then as now, “the cruelty is the point”.
I dunno if I completely agree, but this idea has merit.
It’s hard to imagine life anywhere in the deep South in the days before A/C, but somehow people got through intense heat and humidity for half the year or more.*
Texas had thriving agriculture (farms raising cotton, corn, rice, wheat etc.) in the 19th century after the Civil War, with tenant farmers (increasingly white) replacing slave labor.
*having lived near Houston, I’ve wondered how businesses were able to find office help and other workers willing to endure the hellish summers.
I don’t think that’s the case at all. In the 17th century, colonists weren’t sitting around trying to figure out how to be cruel to Africans. They wanted to make money, slavery was an economic benefit to them, and they engaged in all sort of mental gymnastics to justify their enslavement of others. Had there been no economic incentive, slavery wouldn’t have been such a big part of American history.
I think it was the book 1493 that addressed this. Apparently they did originally use indentured labour from Europe in the cotton and other fields in the South, but they all died of various diseases prevalent there so switching to slaves from Africa, where those diseases already existed, was simply a way of keeping the labour supply up. They were quite aware they were less productive (and potentially more dangerous) than paid workers but felt they had no choice.
Africa was convenient, there was already a flourishing slave market there, and it enabled the notorious Triangular Trade route for shipping.
While slavery was regarded as immoral in Christian countries in Europe, buying Africans was okay because they were pagans, and as an added bonus could be brought into the faith thus saving their souls! Really they were being done a favour.
But that created a new problem - once slaves were Christianised, how to rationalise still keeping them as slaves? This is the point where the rationale switched from religion to skin colour, leading directly into the subhuman trope, supercharged by their misunderstanding of Darwin and by the developing “science” of eugenics.
So in short it doesn’t seem like cotton production in the pre-modern-medicine South could have been viable without slavery.
You separated the quote at the crucial spot. If read as “What we know is that cotton was a tiny crop in the 18th century. Then it boomed…” the progression from the 18th to the 19th century should have been clear. If it wasn’t here’s the explanation.
But they could be continually terrorized, and were. Northern workers had means of organizing and gained political power. The South started the campaign of terror immediately after the war and codified it later. By no means was the North a paradise either for blacks or ethnic white workers, but no comparison of awfulness can fail to conclude that conditions in the postwar South approximated those of the antebellum period. Which, to be clear, were the opposite of the later picture drawn of happy darkies singing in the moonlight.
That lasted only until larger numbers of black slaves (Native Americans at various times and places could also be enslaved) arrived. By the mid-17th century, the attitudes were already hardening.
As Europeans continued to settle the North American colonies throughout the 17th century, the legal codification of race-based slavery also continued to grow. Though many historians agree that slavery and indentured servitude coexisted in the early part of the century (with many Europeans arriving in the colonies under indentures), especially throughout the 1640s-1660s colonies increasingly established laws limiting the rights of Africans and African-Americans and solidifying the institution of slavery upon the basis of race and heredity.
By the end of the century, slavery was legal in almost all colonies, and the children of slaves were automatically slaves themselves. The settlers considered both the African imports and the indigenous natives as savage races distinctly below the white race, and thus little more than recalcitrant animals that deserved treatment no better than a balky mule. White supremacy was baked into the country from before the beginning.
Quite so, and these did grow more sophisticated (and biblically-based) over time as attacks on slavery also evolved. By the time of the war they were so extreme and sickening that more than the small cadre of abolitionists were disturbed. In that mindset war was inevitable.
A great many Native Americans were enslaved; they were just sent overseas to places like the Caribbeans. By importing black slaves and exporting Native American ones, the slavers separated the slaves from the people that they were most likely to either escape to or hope to rescue them.
I’m not questioning the idea slavery in the Americas was a cruel and terrible institution. I’m questioning the idea that it was more about malice than economics. The slavers were driven by their economic interest more than any desire to be cruel.
The North economically outcompeted the North because slavery was an economic drag on the South. The South responded by doubling down on slavery, not by switching to a more profitable system. Because profit was the excuse, not the point.
We’re probably using different definitions of malice. My contention is that since blacks and black slaves were treated differently in the laws than slaves or indentured servants of other races, the attitude toward them was inherently different. They were considered inferior to whites from the beginning.
If purely economic reasons were considered that would not be true. The number of black slaves in the mid-1600s when these laws started appearing was tiny, a total in all the colonies of a few thousand at most. Economically, that number was not a difference maker. White supremacy explains more.
The brutality of slavery certainly rose as the numbers did. By the mid-1800s the number of slaves had risen 100,000% and the fear of Southerners about uprisings and organized revolts probably appreciated proportionally. If you’re equating malice with sheer brutality then I would agree that it metastasized over time. Otherwise malice was present from the beginning.
It’s no doubt the North outcompeted the South. The South doubled down on slavery because that’s where the economic interests of the slavers resided. The South was dominated by these elites and they tended to make decisions that were in their best interest.
(Tangent: I recently took a trip up to Wisconsin which reminded me of what a shithole Arkansas is. When driving in rural Wisconsin, I did not see decay and signs of poverty like I do down here. Even in the smallest of towns, I didn’t seen any broken down homes that left me wondering who the hell lives there.)
Slaves and indentured servants aren’t the same. An indentured servant serves for a set number of years and you don’t own them or their offspring like you do with a slave. Again, I need to stress something here. I’m not questioning the barbarity of slavery. I’m questioning the idea the South was driven by malice rather than what they saw as their own economic needs. Or at least the economic needs of the elite who were running the show. I don’t care how inferior you think Africans are, that’s not going to be the primary driver to bring them across the Atlantic.
I only mentioned indentured servants because black slaves were originally considered to have the same rights as them, yet those changed for one group but not the other.
I’m sure that plenty of Southern slave owners thought that slavery was in their best economic interests. But they were wrong. Bigotry often makes people stupid.
Oh, no- King Cotton was HUGELY profitable. Massively so. Of course when the war came, you cant arm soldiers with cotton and you cant eat it- and cotton farms had depleted soil. So, yeah for a while slavery and cotton was profitable. But you are putting all your eggs in one basket, and unlike the North- The South after the Cotton Gin pretty much stopped developing industrially.
The cotton gin and king cotton was the thing that turned slavery in the USA from dying out- slowly- into thriving. Fortunes were made.
I am not an expert on the economy of the antebellum South. But put yourself in the mindset of a plantation owner in South Carolina during the 1830s. Your bread and butter is a cash crop like cotton or tobacco, but maybe you’re also a banker or you’re invested in other industries related to cotton like shipping or textiles. Your core economic interest lies in that cash crop though. What are you going to do that’s just as profitable as that cash crop you’re so heavily invested in? Slavery was absolutely in the best economic interest of the slavers. They understood that and it’s why they literally went to war to preserve it. It wasn’t so good for the South as a whole of course. We’re still economically underdeveloped.