How much money did america make off of slavery

How much money did america make off of slavery

Posted: Ray Date: 10.06.2017

The Half Has Never Been Told: Slavery and the Making of American Capitalism. Cotton and Race in the Making of America: The Human Costs of Economic Power. Without Consent or Contract: The Rise and Fall of American Slavery. H istorians once thought that slavery had been a source of poverty. Back in the s, when income levels in places like Alabama and Mississippi qualified them as second, if not third, world countries, most academics engaged in the question argued that by tying up large amounts of capital in an inefficient system, slavery had prevented the Southern economy from industrializing.

Potter, even went so far as to suggest that in slavery was about to collapse of its own weight, and the Civil War had been an unnecessary bloodbath.

Now the Old South is one of the fastest-growing parts of the country, and the old argument has shifted a full degrees. They are now prone to ask to what extent the entire United States down to the present day owes its prosperity to 19 th -century slavery.

Was slavery some kind of platform upon which the modern American economy was built? This is not surprising. In the present context, with the United States still struggling to build a multiracial society odd years after the Emancipation Proclamation, the economic history of slavery is obviously a politically freighted issue. But it always has been to one extent or another, and American scholars and intellectuals have never ceased arguing over the question.

how much money did america make off of slavery

For every Oscar Handlin who downplayed the evils of slavery, and even argued that slavery caused racism rather than the other way around, there has been a Nate Glazer who has stressed the singular evils of the American form of slavery compared to every other form known to history.

A t a certain level there is little disagreement over the outline of events that led to the present question. In , when the Constitutional Convention met in Philadelphia, there were about half-a-million slaves in what would soon become the United States. About a third of them were involved in growing rice and indigo, marginal enterprises at best that would soon all but disappear. Slavery had been a source of riches on the sugar plantations of the Caribbean Islands, but almost no part of the United States at the time could grow sugar.

The real money awaited the arrival of cotton, which was still unforeseen as of On the day the United States adopted its Constitution, the country grew no cotton. Producers responded, the technology was easily transferable, and the number of mechanized spindles in operation increased almost daily. Once the textile industry got rolling, in England and New England, only a short time passed before the industry needed more raw cotton than the coastal states could provide.

Population moved toward new land, into areas that would become Alabama, Mississippi, Louisiana, Arkansas, and ultimately Texas. To make room, Native Americans had to be evicted. The steamboat, test-driven on the Hudson, found its real employment on the Mississippi River. Some 9, miles of railway had to be built to transport people and cotton. Once Andrew Jackson killed the Bank of the United States, wildcat banks sprang up to finance the enterprise, and state politicians dreamed up crazy schemes that would saddle them with debt upon which they would eventually default.

And above all, there was the unending struggle over the spread of slavery. As the population moved westward, it dragged , slaves behind it, most walking at least part of the way. By , more than 3 million slaves worked in the American South, 60 percent of them in the cotton fields and the rest either in other crops or as craftsmen.

Of every hour of useful work done in the Southern states, roughly 40 minutes was performed by a slave. Edward Baptist, in his new and widely successful The Half Has Never Been Told , has not been misled. Yet it is the truth. This is a statement about the national economy by an historian rather than an economist, so one has to struggle a bit to find its precise meaning.

It could mean that the incomes of some Americans, probably white, are greater today than they would have been had the slaves been free men and women.

Individuals in both the South and the North accumulated fortunes through dealing in the slave economy. Some fraction of that wealth could have survived the Civil War and, thanks to compound interest, could today amount to a tidy sum.

Baptist pursues this theme not with an econometric model but with the tools of the historian, which he deploys with great vigor. His book is a prodigious work that stacks up a mountain of documentary evidence.

The average plantation with 50 or more slaves was run by just one or two white men. Genovese at least saw a little space within which the slave could maneuver and in many cases negotiate some elemental protections from the slave master. His players are one-dimensional characters who have one objective, money, and one means of obtaining it, physical force.

How Slavery Helped Build a World Economy

Literary flourishes aside, his argument reduces to this: Thanks to Fogel, we actually can calculate the amount of extra income enjoyed by Southern whites as a result of owning slaves. In the s, the zenith of the cotton economy, it came to between 1 and 1. By this period, however, the United States was already the second-largest economy in the world and was investing every year between 13 and 15 percent of GDP in new capital. Individuals clearly benefitted from slavery, but not the nation as a whole.

Baptist not only sells short the enslaved men and women, but he contradicts a fair body of research on the history of slave economies. The slave-run gold mines of Peru, Mexico, and the sugar islands also produced impressive fortunes in their day. Their legacy is modern Peru and Haiti. Edmund Phelps, in his recent book, Mass Flourishing argues that long-term growth requires continuous innovation; not just the big discoveries, but the steady flow of cost savings and improvements that come from an engaged workforce.

They were deprived of the benefits of freedom, and so the country lost the fruits of their genius. Jazz music is exactly the type of thing Phelps has in mind. African Americans always had it in their bones as they toiled in the fields, but it took freedom for it to flourish. Fogel would disagree, but the postwar economy of the American South looks a great deal like the economy of every other commodity producer in history once its heyday had passed.

As insensitive as the statement sounds, remember that slavery was legal and that, in some fairly small number of cases, free blacks owned slaves as well. After a period of groping about, the planters and their former slaves settled into a system of sharecropping that was acceptably efficient at producing cotton, but cotton had already become a bad business. In , the cotton crop was three times the crop of , but its value had fallen from nearly 5 percent of GDP to 1. Incomes were spiraling downward to the point that by Alabama had less than half the per capita income of New York.

Former slaves who were now sharecroppers endured great poverty, as did their white neighbors.

Cotton still proclaimed itself King, but the king nonetheless held out his hand for a government subsidy. Cotton and Race in The Making of America is largely a compilation of previously published works, but the particular strength Dattel brings to the story is his feel for cotton farming as a business. Planters knew that collectively they were into a seam of gold, but so long as they acted independently they were at the mercy of market prices.

Production rose, land values increased, and slave prices remained elevated so long as the price of raw cotton was over 10 cents per pound. Planters went bankrupt when it sold for much less than 8 cents, as it did for much of the s. The Southern Planters Association sought to form a sort of OPEC of cotton, which would have allowed it to extract more of the monopoly rent. Its efforts foundered, however, because planters were too numerous and too dispersed to permit centralized control over production, and they could never raise enough capital to establish a proper commodity-buying board.

Thomas Paine: African Slavery In America

Where Baptist wants Northerners to feel guilty over being prosperous, Dattel wants them to feel guilty over being racist. One of his abiding themes is the conflict that arose within a North that was at once partly abolitionist and very largely racist. Northerners wanted to see blacks free but not in person.

This stance, Dattel asserts without a great deal of support, is what kept African Americans trapped in sharecropping for so long after emancipation. Northern industry imported millions of immigrants from Europe but ignored proven workers to the south.

Slavery And The Making Of America

I have no more concern for them than I have for the Hottentots. His mindset is what freed the Northern conscience to deal with the South and trade in slave-grown cotton. It followed an earlier book, Time On The Cross , which Fogel had written with coauthor Stanley Engerman. This first book, which was similar in method to Without Consent or Contract , was severely criticized when it came out for its detached tone and lack of ostensible outrage over the institution it analyzed.

Fogel, in his later book, goes to some length to remedy this deficiency without ever abandoning the high-minded perspective of a man who would soon win the Nobel Prize. Why were slaves so much more productive than free workers? Centuries of tradition shielded European laborers from the force that was permitted against African and Afro-American slaves. On small plantations, employing 15 or fewer slaves, there was no difference between slave labor and free.

On large plantations, however, those employing 50 or more slaves, the slaves were 39 percent more productive per hour worked. The source of this extra output was the gang system of work that was used on large plantations but not on small ones. The gang system divided cotton cultivation into simple linear tasks each of which was assigned to a group of workers.

No group could fulfill its daily quota unless the one ahead of it did so as well. One pushed the other, with the entire operation supervised by a single overseer with a bullwhip. Free white workers refused to work like this even when offered higher wages. Baptist wants to see the gang system as some kind of capitalist innovation, which in a sense it was. Economists, however, reserve the term innovation for inventions that conserve resources.

It merely allowed slave-owners to beat more work out of their chattel. At some point, even the slave-owners had to realize they were depreciating their own capital, and Fogel does point out that they did a fair amount of experimentation with the length of the work week. It settled in at about 58 hours per week, which meant slaves worked about fewer hours per year than the average yeoman farmer on his own land.

Without Consent or Contract , however, is not all numbers. Fogel sees the war as a historical necessity. Slavery was certainly profitable in cotton cultivation and no less profitable than free labor in manufacturing.

In his view, it was not about to disappear of its own weight. Left to itself, the South, while behind the North, would have been among the five largest economies of the world. Its presence, he maintains, would have encouraged European aristocrats and set back liberalizing trends throughout the West. It also would have had a monopoly on a raw material upon which the world was, at least for a time, vitally dependent.

The inelasticity of that demand meant that an excise tax on cotton would have yielded a Confederate government enough revenue to pursue an adventurous foreign policy in Latin America, and to finance all kinds of mayhem toward the end of perpetuating slavery. Fogel was well aware that in writing on slavery he was playing with political dynamite, but he steadfastly refused to go beyond his material.

The overall impression one takes away from his book is of a composite built up from the accretion of evidence on the subtopics within slavery, each of which is too narrow to carry much political weight.

how much money did america make off of slavery

A Global History Knopf Volume 11, Number 5 Published on: Slavery and the Making of American Capitalism by Edward Baptist Basic Books, , pp. The Human Costs of Economic Power by Gene Dattel Ivan R. Dee, , pp. Paul DeRosa taught economics at Columbia and is a retired principal of Mt.

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