Moved from here. I thought that thread was about slavery reparations.
@Scaff and I recently found ourselves in opposing factual views. His
assertion was "it's a fact that the wealth the country was grown on came from slavery". While I
claimed "Slavery held the US back. The country would have grown faster and more prosperous, and would have greater wealth, if we had never allowed slavery from the beginning, as some at the time wanted us to do. It was a cost" .
GTPlanet faithful will probably wonder why I didn't play the burden of proof position, and the answer is that I know damned well that Scaff can drum up articles to support his statement. I've also put forward citations to
support mine. I've
posted on this
subject quite a bit.
I wanted to offer Scaff what he was apparently looking for, which was hard numbers to support the notion that slavery was a hindrance to the US economy rather than a critical element. And in doing so, I've opened up a can of worms. Because the numbers have all kinds of problems with them, as I'll explain.
Perhaps one question to ask yourself if you're going to read some of this is one I posted before: "Would the US have been better off if we had held on to slavery another 10 years? Another 20? Until present day?"
Let's start with the most basic theory about slavery. Someone works to produce value, and you don't have to compensate them (much) because they are a slave. Therefore, free goods and services, economic boon! The problem with this is that it's mistaking economic distribution for economic growth. What happens when a plantation owner forces a slave to work for his benefit is that the plantation owner is stealing the value created by the slave. The plantation owner then has the value created by his slaves, and can turn around and
sell those goods to others or
consume those goods himself. The measure of an economy is the value created by all of its participants. In this case, the value created by the slaves is a measure of economic output, and it doesn't matter, from a macroeconomic standpoint, whether the slaves are paid or the plantation owner is paid (or neither). The economic output is the total value created. If those people are free people and get paid for their services, the plantation owner's cut drops, but the total output is the same (all other things being equal). What this means is that the fact that slaves work for "free" is immaterial (at least to first order) to the economic story.
Immediately, though, we run into the problem with doing this kind of analysis, because now we have to invent an alternative history to explain what "might have" happened. If the slaves are freed, we now postulate as to what would occur. I've seen some literature that suggests that slaves can be worked harder than free people, and produce more than those people (at least for a short period). They argue that some farms in the south had higher "efficiency" (this is potentially loaded, because what efficiency means is very important and wasn't explained) than the northern counterparts in free states. The conclusion (and I don't know if this was truly supported) was that a free person will work less (though perhaps more efficiently while working) for themselves than a slave can be forced to work for a master. The free person values leisure, rest, and other qualities of life that a slave can be deprived of. As a result, for example, you might get 2 hours of slave work to every 1 hour of free work (I just made that up to illustrate the point). So even if the slave is less efficient while working (and yea, if they're working longer, they will probably be), they can still produce more. And there is research that claims this is the conclusion. Slavery offered higher output per person as compared to the same job from a free person.
Ok so back to our alternative history. This means if we free slaves, they'll work less. And that is also borne out a bit in the south after the civil war, with stories of former masters having trouble paying former slaves to do the same work. So our first alternative history argument might be that slavery was important because if those people were freed, economic output would go down. That might seem pretty basic.
This conclusion falls into the basic trap that many people of the south fell into. First, they assumed that they would proceed with business as usual. In fact, if you look at the output of the north, you see that the north was investing more in alternatives to manual labor (
citation). The south was not doing this because they didn't have to, the economic signals were distorted. Also, it assumes plantation owners themselves would not counteract by working instead of sitting on their porch swing sipping iced tea. The entire southern aristocracy was
enabled by slavery. Those people might have started doing more productive things with their lives if push came to shove. Also, it assumes that the same number of people are available to labor. But slavery required actively murdering a portion of the population to keep it in check (
citation, this citation is only for sanctioned execution, not, as best I can tell, for legal killing by the owner). Freeing those people increases the pool of available workers because you don't have to kill a portion of them to keep them working. In a sense, slavery has to make up for not just the parallel free output, but also the output of dead people that would otherwise be free.
Finally, the biggest mistake (in my personal opinion) is to assume that free slaves would continue to produce value at a pace similar to the pace they were producing while they were enslaved. What I mean by that is, there are lots of jobs that are worth more than manual labor, and freed people can begin to do those jobs and produce far more.
Slavery was a system that stifled education intentionally. And education is linked directly with
economic improvement. If slaves become freed, since we're not racist and know that slaves are capable of self-improvement and learning, they will over time become educated, and their offspring can become more educated. And they can therefore produce
more value by leveraging the well known economic benefits of that education. To assume that slaves will produce less if freed is to assume that slaves are capable of no more than they were being used for. We know for certain that this is not true, as the genetic potential of former slaves has manifest across history. What this means is that some freed slaves (probably not all) can effectively put down their plow and pick up a pencil and create more value intellectually in the form of construction, carpentry, engineering, invention, science, leadership, art, medicine, etc.
Another problem with alternative history is to try to figure out when certain changes will occur in history and what might have happened if those changes occurred at that time. It could be argued that if slavery were discontinued at the founding of the US that the slave trade would have ceased, and so none of those workers would even be present in the US. The productivity of that population is then removed entirely from the US, right? Some have even argued that freeing slaves prior to the start of the US would have resulted in the US losing the revolutionary war. Should we argue then that slavery is integral to the existence of the US because we can assume the US would never have formed without it?
I don't think so. This is actually not an argument that slavery was integral and instead is an argument the forced immigration was beneficial. If slaves might have produced more value when freed, we could argue that it would have been beneficial to capture them, bring them forcibly to the US, and set them free. Or even more efficiently, we could actually entice people to come to the US with favorable immigration policy. What state populations might have looked like in the absence of slavery is difficult to trace through alternative history. It's not a simple as just removing the population. The fact that immigration (even in the form of slavery) was beneficial to the US does not mean that slavery was necessary or integral to the formation of the US simply because it shares characteristics with immigraiton. That would argue that
immigration was necessary or integral to the formation of the US.
Even if you don't agree with what I wrote above, and you think slavery produced more than freed person work across the same population - or somehow you think that immigration was impossible without slavery - or for whatever reason you still think slavery offered a net gain to the US - there is still the ultimate price of slavery to contend with, which is the civil war. The civil war killed approximately as many people as were transported to the US throughout the slave trade (
citation). That's not to say the civil war killed as many people as there were slaves, there were 4 million slaves by the time the civil war was fought. But it puts a heavy point on the cost of the civil war. Southern cities were razed, infrastructure was destroyed. The cost of rebuilding after the civil war was staggering. And I don't think that there is any argument in support of still having to pay the price of the civil war in some alternative history where slavery was never permitted. It was uniquely a cost of slavery.
Ok, so enough of the theory, let's talk practice. As I mentioned, there are so many problems with the numbers surrounding this analysis.
This article discusses one of the problems with assessing something like capital or labor across the civil war, as the charts it picks on include slaves as capital pre-war, and then as labor post-war, making capital and labor look extremely misleading across the civil war. Another problem that was noted was the discussion of average wealth or average income across the south. Quoting something like that prior to the civil war gives a very different impression than after the civil war because the population of slaves is not always included in pre-civil war averages (since they weren't considered people at the time). Average wealth or income is spread across non-slaves in the south prior to the civil war, and then everyone after the civil war. Very deceptive.
Another problem with the numbers often quoted is what is referred to as the "profitability" of slaves. I guess there are some who argued that slaves might not even be profitable to slave owners when compared to running a plantation by paying free people. This is quite a stretch, because in the slave case, the plantation owner is allowed a great deal of criminal behavior to extract additional profit. One would expect this to be profitable to the thief. Turns out based on research that it is
profitable. Nobody should be shocked. But the fact that owning slaves profits the slave owner only explains why slavery persisted. It doesn't speak to whether the nation as a whole profited from slavery. And in fact, as I've argued above, the nation as a whole can lose out and still have slavery persist because some individuals (individuals allowed to vote) profit personally.
In terms of raw numbers, which Scaff asked me for and which I will say upfront I have struggled to find. However, I do have this to offer (
mostly taken from this collection):
"In fact, those states that abolished slavery outright or gradually after the Revolution experienced faster and greater economic growth than did slave states in the decades before the Civil War" -
Jim Piecuch Kennesaw State University Associate Professor.
"The Middle Colonies were the most prosperous, and these were place where slavery was limited. These colonies gradually abolished slavery following independence and were not adversely impacted by abolition. Even in the southern colonies, with the exception of South Carolina and Chesapeake Tidewater areas, prosperity was not tied to slavery until the rise of “King Cotton” in the 1800s. Therefore, it is probably fair to say that in most of the thirteen colonies, slavery was not crucial to prosperity. Coastal South Carolina and the Tidewater were the exceptions." -
Michael Adelberg, Author and Healthcare Consultant (and guy who does lots of seemingly unrelated high profile stuff).
"The fledgling Unites States would have thrived, but likely would not have grown and prospered as fast. Slavery made large scale plantation crops viable and generated capital not only benefitting slave holders directly but indirectly by industry, trade and tax revenues intertwined with the slave economy. Agrarian and industrial expansion in free states demonstrates that both sectors could rise robustly without the need for a foundation of enslaved labor." -
Samuel A. Forman, Harvard University Historian
"The only unassailable answer is “Not so far as we know.” But the parts of the early U.S. of A. that ended slavery or depended on it least had the most productive industrialization, trade, and population growth in the early republic. Many of those enterprises were economically intertwined with regions of the country that contained many slaves, of course. But they also developed other industries and trade routes. Even as the slave-labor plantation system spread west, it didn’t develop. That rigid economy lagged further and further behind what was happening in other portions of the U.S." -
J. L. Bell, Author and Historian
"Gavin Wright (1978) called attention as well to the difference between the short run and the long run. He noted that slaves accounted for a very large proportion of most masters’ portfolios of assets. Although slavery might have seemed an efficient means of production at a point in time, it tied masters to a certain system of labor which might not have adapted quickly to changed economic circumstances. This argument has some merit. Although the South’s growth rate compared favorably with that of the North in the antebellum period, a considerable portion of wealth was held in the hands of planters. Consequently, commercial and service industries lagged in the South. The region also had far less rail transportation than the North. Yet many plantations used the most advanced technologies of the day, and certain innovative commercial and insurance practices appeared first in transactions involving slaves. What is more, although the South fell behind the North and Great Britain in its level of manufacturing, it compared favorably to other advanced countries of the time. In sum, no clear consensus emerges as to whether the antebellum South created a standard of living comparable to that of the North or, if it did, whether it could have sustained it."
citation
"Even in the agricultural sector, Northern farmers were out-producing their southern counterparts in several important areas, as Southern agriculture remained labor intensive while northern agriculture became increasingly mechanized. By 1860, the free states had nearly twice the value of farm machinery per acre and per farm worker as did the slave states, leading to increased productivity. As a result, in 1860, the Northern states produced half of the nation's corn, four-fifths of its wheat, and seven-eighths of its oats."
citation
My conclusion is therefore that slavery held the US back when compared to at least some possible alternative histories. Which might have played out in the absence of slavery is hard to say, but our potential was far greater than our early history actually achieved.
