-Caveat Lector-
an excerpt from:
Emancipating Slaves, Enslaving Freemen
Jeffrey Rogers Hummel©1996
Open Court Publishing
ISBN 0-8126-9311-6
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An excellant study of the period. The Civil War was a fomented conflict. With
the same target as many of today's conspiracies—our republic. Needless to say
the machinations of then have a profound effect upon today.MHO
Much more in book. Highly recommended.
—Notice—William Lloyd Garrison came from the city of Newburyport along with
Caleb Cushing; Cushing's protege, Albert Pike; Caleb Huse; and George Peabody,
founder of a gigantic banking firm in England, to whose service he hired
Junius and J. P. Morgan. When Peabody died, the firm became the House of
Morgan.— Hmm . . .
Om
K
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2
The Political
Economy of Slavery
and Secession
"No Union With Slave-Holders"
William Lloyd Garrison is easily dismissed as hopelessly naive. His opposition
to government was so intense that he and his followers refused even to vote.
But this appearance of strategic naivete is misleading. Once it became clear
that Southerners were not inclined to repent and free their chattels
voluntarily, the Garrisonians fully understood that abolition would require
some political act. They further realized, however, that the politics would
take care of itself—indeed only could take care of itself—after moral suasion
had first created a powerful antislavery constituency.
Yet one of Garrison's proposals remains difficult to fathom. How could
northern secession from the Union help the slaves? To appreciate the true
sophistication of this tactic, a sophistication that Garrison himself may not
have grasped entirely, we must navigate the lively controversy about the
economics of American slavery. Much of the ink in this controversy has been
spilt[sic] over whether slavery was profitable. Although some abolitionists
and later historians pictured cotton plantations as decreasingly lucrative
enterprises to which Southerners clung for cultural reasons, the current
consensus is that slaves did yield a return comparable to other investments at
the time. But this does not close the question, because the word "profitable"
has several meanings.
The Profitability of Slavery* [*The next four sections employ some economic
analysis. Those readers uninterested should feel free to skip ahead to page
52, the section on "The Runaway Slave." ]
Human bondage has been a source of forced labor since the dawn of
civilization. People have sought slaves on every continent and for every
conceivable task. Islamic slavery, which arose during the Middle Ages and
forcibly transported across the Sahara many more millions of souls than were
seized for the transatlantic trade, satisfied a large demand for luxury goods.
These black Africans were compelled to serve as retainers, servants, or
concubines. Even when not directly satisfying their masters' desires, many
slaves in the medieval and ancient worlds engaged in household production
only. New World slavery, in contrast, produced tobacco, sugar, rice, cotton
and other commodities for world markets.
The ultimate consumers of the cotton that black slaves grew in the American
South were workers in England and elsewhere who wore clothes manufactured from
it. The price of these slaves therefore was like the price of any other
capital good, including corporate stock, farm land, or cattle. The planter
held title to the slave's future labor. This labor produced an income stream
equal to the value of output minus the slave's subsistence, maintenance, and
management. Market competition would drive prices to the present sum of this
expected future income, discounted at the prevailing rate of interest. Because
the future was uncertain and information costly, this income stream would
occasionally diverge from expectations. But since there was no reason to
expect these entrepreneurial errors to be systematic in either direction,
slaves were as profitable on average as any other asset traded in the market.
Southerners also bought slaves for conspicuous personal consumption. Indeed, a
particular bondsman might work both as a field hand and domestic servant.
Thus, two sources of demand were impinging on the same market. But the record
of pre-Civil War slave prices confirms that very few purchases were for mere
consumption. Prime field hands by the mid-1850s cost upwards of $1,200, or
$21,000 in today's prices, and the figure was sensitive to anything that could
affect the field hand's future labor: health, skills, gender, reliability,
with age being the most important. Prices generally peaked when a slave
reached his or her mid-to-late twenties, and then fell off along with the
expected number of remaining productive years. A skilled blacksmith commanded
a 55 percent premium over this average, whereas a disabled or unreliable slave
would sell at a discount of up to 65 percent. Twenty-seven-year-old females
averaged 80 percent of the cost of male slaves the same age.
These prices were flexible enough to keep the return on slaves in the South
hovering between 8 and 12 percent, comparable to the antebellum return on the
capital of New England textile firms or railroad companies. At any one time, a
particularly astute planter might exceed these rates, while one who was
particularly inept might face insolvency. Over the passage of time, above-
normal returns during a cotton boom might signal slaveholders generally to
expand cultivation in order to satisfy mounting industrial demand, as happened
during the 1850s; below-normal returns might encourage slaveholders to shift
resources away from cotton, as for instance during the deflation of the early
1840s.
But overall, rather than facing economic demise, slavery was thriving right up
to the Civil War. Cotton was the American economy's leading sector,
constituting half of all exports. For ambitious white Southerners, the primary
avenue to greater wealth and status remained slave ownership. "Never before
has the planting been more profitable than in the last few years," wrote
Professor C. F. McCay of South Carolina in 1860. "The planters have been
everywhere rich, prosperous and happy."[1] Yet just because the peculiar
institution was profitable to planters, it does not follow that it was
beneficial to everyone living in the region.
To appreciate how individual profit might fail to generate economy-wide
advantages, consider another contentious issue that tended to alienate
Southerners from Northerners: the tariff. A protective trade barrier such as
the 1828 Tariff of Abominations, which pushed up prices of competing imports,
clearly benefited some domestic producers. Yet it hurt domestic buyers because
they now had to pay the higher prices. Economic theory proves, with only a few
technical exceptions that almost never obtain in the real world, that the
losses from trade restrictions exceed the gains. The Tariff of Abominations
not only redistributed income from Southerners and other consumers to
northeastern manufacturers but in the process made the average American
poorer. While profitable to protected interests, the tariff was harmful for
the country. Slavery worked out similarly.
The Social Cost of Slavery
The most salient economic feature of the South's peculiar institution is that
it was like theft. It involved a compulsory transfer from black slaves to
white masters. Whereas free workers exchanged labor for market wages, a
slaveowner could rent out slaves at the same wage, force them to do the same
work, but grant them only a portion of the earnings in money or in kind and
keep the difference. The amount the owner kept constituted the transfer and
gave slaves a positive price.
Economists cannot quantify a transfer's effect on well-being precisely. After
the Atlantic trade was shut down and replacement of slaves became expensive,
the planter had more incentive to promote his chattels' health and
productivity. The food, clothing, shelter, and other payments in kind that
slaves received came to an average of about $30 per year at 1860 prices.[2]
This was adequate to give the American slave a life expectancy of thirty-six
years, slightly less than rural whites, but comparable to urban populations,
and higher than in Europe. Yet surely these expenditures did not provide the
same subjective satisfaction to the slave as an equal monetary wage. Free
laborers have far more opportunity to exchange money on the market for goods
and services tailored to their unique preferences. Making this comparison
would be no more valid than pricing all the food, clothing, housing, and
medical care received by present-day prisoners and claiming it equivalent to
the same number of dollars earned on the outside.
A joke once told about an escaped slave from Kentucky who was brought before
an Indiana justice of the peace illustrates the difficulty:
Judge: "Were you unhappy there?"
Slave: "Oh no. I had a good life there."
Judge: "Were you mistreated?"
Slave: "No. Old Masa and me was the greatest friends. Fished and hunted
together."
Judge: "Did you have good food and housing?"
Slave: "Sure enough. Ham and 'taters. Molasses. My little cabin had roses over
the door."
Judge: "I don't understand. Why did you run away?"
Slave: "Well your Honor, the situation is still open down there if you'd like
to apply for it."[3]
Besides this unquantifiable burden, the peculiar institution diminished
southern welfare in other ways. Forced transfers have secondary effects. The
pirates who plagued colonial waters until the middle of the eighteenth century
enriched themselves with captured cargoes. If they sunk merchant ships in the
process, then the losses of merchants exceeded the gains of pirates.
Economists call this excess burden "deadweight loss," and it is the reason
they consider theft inefficient. Pure transfers are assumed to cancel out
between gainers and losers, but people nonetheless are worse off on average.
Most deadweight loss results not from damage done during theft but from the
way people alter their behavior in response. They reallocate resources either
to seek transfers or avoid them. The major net losses from piracy were not
ships sunk but all the expenditures on protecting cargoes that merchants could
have made on other things, and all the unrealized gains from the ocean trade
that piracy scared away, as well as all the ships and sailors that pirates
devoted to stealing that otherwise could have furthered mutually beneficial
pursuits. Notice that despite these losses, stealing was still profitable to
the pirates. Theft, after all, is the quintessential case where individual
incentives do not lead to socially optimal outcomes.
Part of the peculiar institution's deadweight loss resulted from how it
changed the behavior of blacks. Because human bondage replaced the enticement
of a wage with the threat of violence, the quantity and quality of work
differed from what free laborers would have provided. The South's aggregate
output was consequently worth less, even if we treat all dollar transfers as
having made slaveholders better off to the exact same degree that slaves were
worse off.
Slaveholders, of course, mixed positive and negative incentives. Not all the
bondsman's labor was coercively extracted. Slaves were fed and received other
payments, as already noted. Slaveholders could decide whether to try to induce
additional work with rewards (pecuniary and non-pecuniary) or with
punishments. They would usually only resort to force when it was less
expensive. Because coercion itself uses up labor, as well as other scarce
resources, not to mention possible loss of output from injuring or killing the
slave, it was not always cheaper than paying an implicit wage.
Slaveowners found positive incentives less costly for jobs requiring greater
skill, initiative, or self-discipline. In towns and cities, where such jobs
predominated, the practice of hiring out slaves and giving them a fixed sum or
percentage became well established. Slaves who were skilled carpenters,
masons, or other artisans often could "hire their own time," that is, choose
their own employers and thereby engage in entrepreneurship. Many lived
separately from their masters. Charles Ball, a black undertaker in Savannah,
Georgia, was even able to hire other slaves to help with his jobs, paying his
master $250 a year in monthly installments. "A city slave," observed black
leader Frederick Douglass, "is almost a free citizen" because he "enjoys
privileges altogether unknown to the whip-driven slave on the plantation."[4]
These practices were so remunerative for slaveowners that they persisted
despite countless municipal and state ordinances outlawing them. This made
bound labor adaptable to a diversity of occupations. Lumber camps, sawmills,
coal mines, rock quarries, textile mills, riverboats, cattle ranches, and
railroads throughout the South employed black slaves, who also comprised half
the work force at the Tredegar Iron Works in Richmond, Virginia, while over
two thousand were iron workers in the Cumberland River region of Tennessee.
One exceptional case involved a Mississippi slave named Simon Gray, who during
the 1850s became captain of a Natchez flat boat, managing and paying a crew
that included white men. He also conducted other business for his company,
requiring that he carry firearms, travel freely, and handle large sums of
money. Out of his salary Gray could afford to rent a house for himself and his
family. His owners even permitted him a vacation in Arkansas for his health.
To the extent that bondsmen worked for explicit or implicit wages, the system
operated like free labor. "Whenever a slave is made a mechanic," complained
James Henry Hammond of South Carolina, "he is more than half freed."[5] What
distinguished slavery was the master's option to wield brutality and terror.
Theoretically he could add sufficient force to induce a slave to do any task
that could be induced with a wage. Flogging was the most common method. This
power was legally limited only by unenforceable state laws protecting human
chattel from murder and mutilation and setting minimum standards for
subsistence.
Imagine, however, the security costs of employing a typical slave as a boat
captain, and you can understand why the case of Simon Gray was rare. Bondsmen
usually were not useful for jobs requiring extensive travel, wide dispersion,
use of firearms, or high degrees of trustworthiness, especially when lots of
cash was involved. "The point here is not that one incentive system," either
rewards or punishments, "was categorically more efficient than the other,"
notes economist Thomas Sowell. Which-of the two was cheaper "differed
according to the work and to the cost of knowledge to those who held the
decision-making power."[6] Given the existing technology of force, there were
many jobs in the South where hiring free laborers was invariably less costly
than coercing slaves. But these very often tended to be jobs requiring
initiative, discretion, and diligence, where close monitoring was
prohibitively expensive—in other words, jobs that commanded higher wages
because the output was more valuable.
Many blacks, if free, might have done these well-paid jobs. They therefore
could produce either of two possible streams of future output-one less
valuable while slaves and one more valuable while free. Wherever such a
discrepancy arose, it became a mutually profitable deal for the slave to buy
his freedom from his owner. Despite the refusal of state laws to recognize the
bondsman's right to hold property, his higher asset value once free should
have enabled him to borrow the purchase price, under all sorts of risk and
repayment plans, either from his master or a third party.
Varied institutional arrangements have facilitated slave selfpurchase
historically. Throughout ancient Greece and Rome, manumission and ransom
prices were frequently higher than market prices for slaves, and slave self-
purchase became so common that it may have been one factor in the
institution's decline during the Pax Romana, after supplies of fresh captives
dried up. The right of slaves to buy their freedom in many Latin American
countries became formalized in a practice known as coartacion. Manumission by
slaveowners practically eliminated slavery in Mexico long before formal
abolition in 1829. Even in Brazil and Cuba, where sugar plantations made bound
labor far more commercially vital, the number of free blacks was approaching
the number of slaves by the nineteenth century.
Manumission through self-purchase was not unknown in the United States, being
most common in the upper South. But as the distinguished historian of slavery,
David Brion Davis, has noted, "the most important distinction between the
legal status of slaves in British and Latin America" was the extensive
barriers to manumission in British-settled areas. "Only in the Southern United
States did legislators try to bar every route to emancipation and deprive
masters of their traditional right to free individual slaves."[7]
Except when temporarily relaxed during the Revolutionary- era, these barriers
severely inhibited self-purchase. Between 1790 and 1800, the population of
free blacks in the Atlantic slave states nearly doubled. If that increase had
continued at the same rate until 1860, almost the entire slave population of
the country would have become free. In actuality the number of southern free
blacks by the 1850s was rising more slowly than the number of slaves.[8] Even
when laws against manumission could be evaded, the widespread legal
disabilities faced by free blacks, especially requirements that they leave the
state, reduced their potential incomes and made self-purchase less viable.
Because of all these legal obstructions, slavery necessarily misallocated
labor into less productive uses. Slaves were not only worse off, but the
South's aggregate output was lower than otherwise. This does not justify
slaves having to buy their own liberty but merely acknowledges that the market
provided a route to eliminate this inefficiency and simultaneously erode the
peculiar institution. Why planters should erect such barriers when it was in
their individual self-interest to permit self-purchase is a question to which
we will return.
Unfortunately not all bondsmen had the potential to be more productive as
freedmen. But the opportunities for manumission through self-purchase were not
confined to those cases. Most individuals have what John Moes has called a
"sentimental attachment" to their own body.[9] A slave therefore would value a
dollar's worth of wages more highly once free. Blacks may have been willing to
do the same physical work for less retained income just to avoid the
humiliations and hardships of bondage. This would have still left enough from
their wages to buy out their owners. Because of the obstacles put in the way
of manumission, however, it is impossible to know for how many this was
realistic.
Overworking the Slaves
Nearly three-quarters of America's slaves toiled on plantations or farms in
1860, and the proportion was climbing. Most of these bondsmen were in the
South's cotton belt; others grew sugar in lower Louisiana, rice along the
coast of South Carolina and Georgia, or tobacco in Virginia. For the greater
number of them, selfpurchase was almost certainly unfeasible even had it been
legal. Large plantations were the one place where free white labor could not
compete effectively against black slave labor. The reason? The threat of the
lash compelled field hands to work longer, or perhaps harder, than anyone
would for market wages.
During peak seasons, black drivers herded gangs of men and women into
agricultural assembly-lines that labored from sunup to sundown. Edmund Ruffin,
a militant apologist for the peculiar institution, saw this as the source of
its superior productivity: "Slave labor, in each individual case, and for each
small measure of time, is more slow and inefficient than the labor of a free
man.... But the slave labor is continuous.... Free laborers, if to be hired
for the like duties, would require at least double the amount of wages to
perform one-third more labor in each day."[10] Planters moreover put women
into the fields, even when pregnant or soon after childbirth, and children
beginning around ages eight to twelve. Slaves too old for field work took over
the care of infants along with other light household duties. As a result of
the plantation's "full employment" regime, two-thirds of slaves participated
in the labor force, compared with only one-third for free populations, North
and South.
These slaves were being worked well beyond the point where the value of their
output could cover a wage that would attract free laborers. One implication of
Robert William Fogel and Stanley L. Engerman's well-known and much-criticized
study of American slavery is that a single field hand's labor on large
plantations was worth $52 per year more than the cotton he produced.[11] if
free and receiving the full value of their output, these blacks would have
done less work and consumed more leisure, or perhaps done work that produced
less but was more fun or interesting or had other non-pecuniary rewards.
In these instances, where planters compelled laborers to give up leisure or
on-the-job rewards, slavery did raise the economy's physical output. This too,
however, represented a misallocation of labor, a misallocation that made
aggregate production too high rather than too low, because the extra output
came at the expense of total well-being. Each additional hour of labor was
producing less than its value to the laborer as leisure. In other words, for
every dollar that slavery drove up southern output it drove up deadweight loss
as well. Fogel and Engerman put this loss for the South overall at $74 million
in 1850 alone.[12]
The ultimate gainers from this increased cotton production were primarily
consumers. Higher output drove down cotton prices and caused a redistribution
from black slaves to American, English, and continental wearers of clothing.
But since there were many more of them, these benefits were thoroughly
dispersed. One estimate is that every dollar gained by a typical user of
cotton cloth imposed a welfare loss of $400 on some individual slave.[13]
Although the planter usually earned a competitive return on his chattels,
American blacks were being deprived of leisure so that millions of workers
elsewhere could live slightly better.
To summarize, so long as we concentrate on the behavior of blacks, the
peculiar institution pushed the South's aggregate production of goods and
services in two conflicting directions. Insofar as slavery forced laborers to
work at less valued jobs, it lowered output. Insofar as slavery forced
laborers to work more hours or more intensely, it raised output. Since
increased output predominated in southern agriculture, it undoubtedly swamped
the reduction in output, which must have been most common in the South's urban
areas. The adverse impact on aggregate well-being was unambiguous, however.
For calculating slavery's deadweight loss, the two tendencies, rather than
counteracting each other, add together. And while bondsmen bore most of this
burden, their effective exclusion from more highly valued jobs hurt some white
Southerners as well.
The Enforcement of Slavery
Everybody knows that bondage hurt the slave. But recall that deadweight loss
is more than harm to one person or a group. It implies that, even after an
implausibly generous allowance for offsetting benefits to the masters, the
loss to the slaves was so great that it exceeded those gains, making everyone
on average poorer in the Old South. Furthermore, we have yet to consider any
deadweight loss from the way the peculiar institution changed the behavior of
slaveowners.
Masters had two ways to motivate their chattels. When they used (implicit or
explicit) wages, the cost to them was a gain for the slaves. Every dollar an
employer paid out in wages was a dollar that an employee received. In
contrast, when owners used violence, the cost of that was not a receipt to the
slaves. It therefore constituted more deadweight loss, converting all the
slave system's enforcement into a social burden for the region. Without
slavery, these resources would have been used in other endeavors.
The most that can be said about this additional net loss was that it fell
exclusively on the slaves-so long as each individual planter had to cover his
own enforcement costs. His expected returns from the coerced labor would then
be greater than these costs. Even this ceased to be true, however, if
slaveholders could impose part of the costs on non-slaveholding whites. Given
that wealth, prestige, and power were becoming increasingly concentrated in
the hands of large planters, it is no surprise that such was in fact the case.
The chief way that the South's slaveholding elite externalized the costs of
the peculiar institution was slave patrols. Established in every slave state,
these patrols enforced black codes by apprehending runaways, monitoring the
rigid pass requirements for blacks traversing the countryside, breaking up
large gatherings and assemblies of blacks, visiting slave quarters randomly,
inflicting impromptu punishments, and as occasion arose, suppressing
insurrections. The patrollers. generally made their rounds at night and were
more active and regular in areas with many slaves. Loosely connected with the
local militia, patrol duty was compulsory for most ablebodied white males.
Exemption usually required paying a fine or hiring a substitute. The slave
patrols thereby affixed a tax that shifted enforcement costs to small
slaveholders, and poor whites who owned no slaves.
Proslavery theorist George Fitzhugh was acutely conscious of the slave
patrol's crucial function in an era and region where professional police were
unknown. "The poor ... constitute our militia and our police. They protect men
in possession of property, as in other countries; and do much more, they
secure men in possession of a kind of property which they could not hold a day
but for the supervision and protection of the poor [emphasis added]."[14] This
aspect did not escape the bondsmen themselves, who had a healthy and well-
warranted fear of the patrollers. They "are poor white men" said one fugitive
slave who had fled to Canada, "who live by plundering and stealing, getting
rewards for runaways."[15]
Consider the consequences of imposing these security costs on whites owning no
slaves. Coercion was now less expensive for each slaveholder, so that the
trade-off between positive and negative incentives was shifted toward
coercion. Not only did this worsen the bondsmen's lot, but expenditures on
enforcement were now driven to the point where they well exceeded any gains to
planters. Deadweight loss went up still further with free whites bearing some
of the burden. Since patrol duty fell more heavily on the poor, the subsidy to
slaveholders was matched by a tax on free labor. Manumission through self-
purchase became still less attractive to masters because of the. subsidy. As
slavery's enforcement costs were thus socialized, owners experienced capital
gains, although the higher slave prices left the rate of return unaltered.
The desire to reduce slavery's enforcement costs also explains the seeming
anomaly of laws hindering slave self-purchase. A large and prosperous free
black community would make it easier and more appealing for slaves to escape
or resist. As the free black populations grew in Delaware and Maryland after
the Revolution, for instance, the threat of runaways sped up the process of
voluntary manumission. The gradual emancipation laws of many northern states
did not free any slaves alive when enacted, and those born afterwards were
held in bondage until their mid-twenties, allowing owners to recoup the costs
of raising them. Nonetheless, these laws inexorably drove up the number of
free Negroes in the North, and slaves could abscond more easily. Slaveowners
found that manumission through self-purchase or a promise of early liberty
were better ways to salvage returns than trying to hold slaves for as long as
the law allowed. Prohibitions against manumission, restrictions on free
blacks, indeed the promotion of racial prejudice itself, all helped planters
coerce their chattels more cheaply. The same purpose was behind the laws that
forbade teaching slaves to read and write, although by discouraging the
formation of human capital, these laws likewise made the South poorer.
Some of slavery's critics have charged that it absorbed southern savings and
retarded economic development; the money planters invested in slaves could
have been invested in railroads or factories. This charge confuses monetary
with real phenomena. The money used to purchase a slave did not disappear but
continued to circulate. Trading slaves from one owner to another no more
absorbed savings than trading land or any other real asset. Nor does the lack
of southern industrialization, relative to the North, necessarily reflect a
cost of slavery. True, fewer than one Southerner in ten lived in a town of at
least 2,500 inhabitants in 1860, compared with one in three New Englanders.
But urbanization in the South was not far behind the Midwest. It was more
efficient for a region like the South to specialize in agriculture, in which
it had a comparative advantage, and permit the North to specialize in
manufacturing.
Nevertheless, the peculiar institution did have a real resource cost that can
be thought of as similar to the absorption of savings. Enforcing the slave
system required the use of labor and capital.
Every dollar that Southerners spent this way, beyond what they would have
spent otherwise to protect life and property, was deadweight loss. This
reduction in welfare, moreover, translates unambiguously into a fall in
output. In real terms, the entire southern economy, including both whites and
blacks, was less prosperous.
How much less? Modern measures of national income are inherently imprecise,
despite all that governments nowadays do to collect and refine these
statistics. Imagine how much more riddled with imprecision must be estimates
for periods like the Civil War, long before governments regularly gathered the
data. Nonetheless, if we accept the tentative conjectures of economic
historians, per capita income in the South, counting slaves as part of the
population, was almost one-third lower than in the North in 1840—$74 as
compared with $109 (at 1860 prices). Southern per capita income had risen by
1860 to $103, while that in the North had risen to $141, reducing the
percentage difference only slightly. [16] These gaps are consistent at least
with the perceptions of contemporary outside observers, who almost uniformly
commented on the economic backwardness of the slave states compared to the
free states.
Not all of this backwardness was attributable to the peculiar institution.
Despite a steady decline in import duties, tariffs fell disproportionately on
Southerners, reducing their income from cotton production by at least 10
percent just before the Civil War.[17] But more important, regional
disparities understate slavery's harm. Remember that compulsion artificially
stimulated the South's production of cotton and other staples. The fact that
output per capita was still noticeably lower than in the North, even though
the black population was forced to work longer or harder, is a stunning
indictment of the peculiar institution.
To be clear, the South was neither stagnant nor impoverished. Since the 1830s,
the entire United States had been experiencing the sustained economic growth
associated with the Industrial Revolution. Capital accumulation, technological
innovation, and material abundance were transfiguring the landscape. These
were the natural outcomes from the country's prior advances toward free trade,
unrestricted migration, and virtual laissez faire. Unencumbered by domestic
restraints on the flow of goods and services, the South was an integrated part
of this dynamic and vibrant marketplace. Even though southern per capita
income was lower than northern, it climbed slightly faster between 1840 and
1860.
Some have pointed to this rapid growth as evidence that slavery was not
burdensome to the economy. But with capital mobility between North and South,
we would expect the peculiar institution's cost to register only in relative
income figures, especially during a decade with a cotton boom. Indeed, most of
the South's growth resulted from shifting slaves and other resources into the
high yield lands of the southwest. What is more telling is that the North
maintained its lead at a time when its population was increasing nearly twice
as fast, having doubled over the two decades, due to the most extensive
relative influx of immigrants in American history. Even white Southerners—at
least 200,000 between 1840 and 1860—were leaving the slave states to settle in
the free states.
We can now appreciate the real horror of slave exploitation. Slavery inflicted
on blacks tremendous pain, suffering, and sometimes death, along with other
more mundane burdens, such as lost income. The American South not only was
poorer overall as a result, but non-slaveholding whites, were also poorer.
Wealthy planters, extracting enormous transfers from black slaves and smaller
transfers from poor whites, earned rates of return no greater than northern
merchants and manufacturers. In fact, competition probably ensured that few of
the perpetrators of this vile system secured exorbitant profits. The flexible
price for females made any breeding of slaves for the market receive the going
rate, as no doubt did the transatlantic slave trade, when we adjust for risks,
such as capture after British suppression. Only during the colonial period,
when European governments granted slave-trade monopolies to privileged
companies, might returns have risen above normal, but these too would have
been capitalized into the price of the companies' shares. We may even
reasonably speculate that the profits for the African rulers who first
captured the slaves were somewhat competitive, since there were several black
states bidding for European buyers. The major beneficiaries were those who
could now buy cheaper cotton textiles or other consumption goods made from
slave labor.
Although slaveowners merely earned market returns, they had powerful
incentives to perpetuate the peculiar institution. The total value of all
slaves in the United States as of 1860 is estimated at between $2.7 and $3.7
billion." Immediate abolition would have instantly transferred this entire sum
from slaveholders to the freed slaves. Because of slavery's deadweight loss,
moreover, emancipation's welfare gains for blacks would far exceed this
amount. Not just abolition but any step that increased enforcement costs
consequently threatened slaveholders with massive capital losses, as it
depressed the value of the income stream expected from their chattels. "Were
ever any people civilized or savage, persuaded by any argument, human or
divine, to surrender voluntarily two thousand millions of dollars?" the
slaveowner James Henry Hammond asked the abolitionists.[19] And so, the
slavocracy was willing to invest considerable political resources and
eventually fight tooth and nail to preserve a system that in the long run
benefited very few Americans.
The Runaway Slave
The runaway slave was the system's Achilles heel. Each fugitive did more than
deprive the slaveholder of a valuable capital asset; if running away became
easier, enforcement costs rose. This in turn reduced the value of remaining
slaves. Manumission through selfpurchase would become more appealing to
slaveholders, but if they were to succumb to this appeal, the dissolution
would accelerate. More manumissions meant more free blacks which further eased
escape and raised costs until the viability of the peculiar institution itself
came into question.
The predominately rural South was not all that densely populated to begin
with, especially along the frontier. One major reason that Indians proved less
desirable as slaves than blacks was because it was so much easier for natives
to disappear into a wilderness they already knew well. Colonial Massachusetts
and South Carolina collected lots of captives during Indian wars, but most
were sold to the West Indies, where escape was harder. As late as the 1850s,
inaccessible parts of the South, although rapidly receding, harbored some
maroon colonies, groups of fugitive blacks who remained at large for years.
individuals most frequently ran off for short periods, either hiding out in
the woods, swamps, or other impenetrable terrain, or visiting neighboring
holdings where they might have friends or family. Without the system of slave
patrols, local runaways would have been more numerous.
But slave patrols alone could not dim the allure of fleeing permanently to a
free state. Hence Southerners had insisted upon a fugitive slave clause in the
Constitution; escaping slaves would then fear recapture even in the North. And
just as the compulsory patrol imposed slavery's enforcement costs on non-
slaveholders in the South, the fugitive slave clause imposed these costs on
Northerners. It was the prime way the United States government subsidized the
peculiar institution. Congress had initially passed legislation enforcing the
fugitive slave clause back in 1793, at the end of President Washington's first
term. The recovery of runaways was put under joint supervision of national and
state courts. Not only did the free states willingly cooperate, but many of
them allowed Southerners to bring along slaves on visits, sometimes for up to
nine months.
Radical abolitionists put this Fugitive Slave Law under fire during the 1830s
and 1840s. They legally challenged it in the courts and illegally evaded it.
The illegal evasion led to the famous underground railroad, in which white
abolitionists and free blacks spirited runaway slaves to freedom in Canada.
Well known are the exploits of Harriet Tubman, who after escaping from bondage
herself returned repeatedly to Maryland's Eastern Shore to bring out others.
The free blacks (as well as fellow slaves) responsible for the bulk of such
assistance, however, remain mostly unsung. Better remembered are the
underground railroad's smaller number of white operatives, a few of whom
hazarded serious dangers. Calvin Fairbanks, an Oberlin graduate, went south
again and again, despite a first sentence that confined him for five years,
until he was apprehended a second time. He languished in a Kentucky prison for
another twelve years, finally gaining release at the Civil War's close.
Charles Turner Torrey, a New England minister, is credited with rescuing four
hundred slaves from Virginia before being caught and then dying in jail in
1846.
The legal challenges to the Fugitive Slave Law earned Liberty Party leader
Salmon P. Chase the nickname of "attorney general for runaway Negroes" in
Ohio. One challenge from Pennsylvania finally found its way to the Supreme
Court in 1842. The Court's decision in Prigg v. Pennsylvania was a pro- and
antislavery mixture. It granted slaveholders the right to recapture slaves
using private force, without going through any legal process, state or
federal. The Constitution "manifestly contemplates the existence of a
positive, unqualified right on the part of the owner of the slave, which no
state law or regulation can in any way qualify, regulate, control, or
restrain," wrote Justice Joseph Story in rendering the Court's opinion. "Upon
this ground we have not the slightest hesitation in holding, that ... the
owner of a slave is clothed with the entire authority, in every State in the
Union, to seize and recapture his slave, whenever he can do it without any
breach of the peace, or any illegal violence."[20] The Pennsylvania law that
treated such private seizures as kidnapping was therefore struck down.
In another part of his opinion, however, Story conceded that the state
governments were under no positive obligation to assist enforcement of the
fugitive slave provision. Seven northern legislatures responded with personal
liberty laws. These either prohibited state officials from participating in a
recapture or forbade holding fugitive slaves in state or local jails. In the
face of these hostile enactments, the legal privilege to head north and
personally retrieve slaves did not amount to much.
That is why Southerners demanded a tougher fugitive slave law. Preventing
flight was of dire importance to the slave system. If blacks could simply
obtain freedom by slipping across an open border, enforcement throughout the
upper South was compromised, and the lower South would feel the repercussions.
This southern concern about runaways had been one motive for U.S. acquisition
of the Floridas immediately before and after the War of 1812. Spain had not
outlawed slavery there, but slaveholders found it less convenient to hunt down
fugitives in this unsettled borderland so long as it was under foreign
jurisdiction. Similar concerns led the national government two decades later
to initiate the army's most costly and protracted Indian war, against
Florida's Seminoles, who provided safe refuge to runaways.
Although the peculiar institution was expanding in the southwest, it was
retreating along the South's borders and from its cities. Delaware, Maryland,
Kentucky, Missouri, and the western counties of Virginia had seen the
proportion of slaves out of their total populations steadily decline after
1830 until it was approaching that of New York at the time of the Revolution.
Kentucky, with the highest slave proportion of these regions, chose delegates
for a state constitutional convention in 1849, and a full 10 percent of the
voters supported a gradual-emancipation plan similar to the one previously
adopted in New York.
One Virginian who served both in his state legislature and Congress, Charles
James Faulkner, understood quite well the implications of Pennsylvania's new
personal liberty law. it "has rendered our slave property ... utterly
insecure.... slaves are absconding from Maryland and this portion of Virginia
in gangs of tens and twenties and the moment they reach the Pennsylvania line,
all hopes of their recapture are abandoned. The existence of such a law on the
Statute Book of any State is not only a flagrant violation of the spirit of
the Federal Constitution and indeed of its express provisions, but is a
deliberate insult to the whole Southern people, which ... would amongst
nations wholly independent and disconnected by Federal Relations be a just
cause of War." [21]
Faulkner and other Southerners probably exaggerated the number escaping to the
free states, but we will never know for sure. The accepted estimate is not
higher than a thousand per year, nearly all from the border states, although
many more tried and failed. The only certainty is that without a fugitive
slave law, the number would have soared. Since the Constitution explicitly
required their return, we can now understand why Garrison's call for disunion
posed such a danger to the peculiar institution. Northern secession
represented an effective way to eliminate this subsidy to slaveholders. The
abolitionists realized that this would help make the North an asylum for
runaways.
Slavery flourished because the country's political and legal structure
socialized its enforcement costs. Like the incomes enjoyed by today's tobacco
growers, which depend on munificent subsidies from the U.S. government, the
economic viability of the peculiar institution rested on political power.
Removing the free states out from under the Constitution's fugitive slave
provision would at first undermine slavery in the upper South. But the lower
South faced a potentially fatal domino effect. Once the supports provided by
local, state, and central governments were knocked out, a combination of
market forces and a black thirst for liberty could bring the system down.
But the planter oligarchy had far too much at stake to let those props go
easily. Again, let us quote Faulkner, our legislator from Virginia: "No
proposition can be plainer than that the slaveholding interest in this country
is everywhere one and the same. An attack upon it here is an attack upon it in
South Carolina and Alabama. Whatever weakens and impairs it here weakens and
impairs it there. The fanaticism of Europe and Northern America is embarked on
a crusade against it. We must stand or fall together."[22]
Black Resistance
David Walker was born a free black in North Carolina in 1785. After traveling
widely, he settled in Boston, where he owned a shop near the wharves. But this
active member of the Massachusetts General Colored Association had much more
on his mind than bartering and trucking old clothes. In 1829 Walker penned and
printed at his own expense An Appeal to the Coloured Citizens of the World,
described by one northern Quaker as the most inflammatory publication in
history, it plainly advocated violence and revolution. "We must and shall be
free," Walker warned white Americans. Unless slavery was ended "for your
good," blacks would resort to "the crushing arm of power.... And wo, wo, will
be to you if we have to obtain our freedom by fighting." As soon as bondsmen
abandoned their habitual servility, "I do declare it, that one good black man
can put to death six white men."[23] Walker managed through his brisk
business with sailors to smuggle his pamphlet into the South.
The timing of Walker's message was providential. It appeared little more than
fifteen months before the premier issue in January of 1831 of Garrison's
Liberator, a publication which eventually would reprint Walker's Appeal in its
entirety. That August, Nat Turner launched in Virginia the bloodiest slave
insurrection the United States had yet experienced, an event Southerners
widely credited to the writings of Walker and Garrison. The same year, slave
rebellion swept through British Jamaica. The nullification crisis between
South Carolina and the central government was coming to a head. Then at the
beginning of 1832, Virginia voted down the South's most considered effort at
dismantling the peculiar institution, while a year later, partially impelled
by what happened in Jamaica Parliament approved compensated emancipation in
British possessions. Walker, however, was not alive to see this rapid
unfolding of events. He had been found dead in his shop's doorway in June
1830, under mysterious circumstances still unsolved by historians.
This early black revolutionary had touched a raw nerve. Outright resistance
was another way, the most emphatic of all, to increase slavery's enforcement
costs. Slave rebellions in the United States were never as frequent, large, or
successful as in the Caribbean and South America, a fact that has long
intrigued historians. Argument still goes on over where slavery was harsher,
but we do know that the North American slave population was already growing
rapidly through natural reproduction well before the slave trade was closed in
1808, whereas virtually everywhere else in the New World slavery depended upon
the continuing importation of blacks. Thus, Brazil and the Caribbean islands
received more than 85 percent of the ten million Africans forcibly shipped
across the Atlantic from the sixteenth through the nineteenth century, but by
1825 the U.S. slave population of 1,750,000 accounted for more than one-third
of all slaves in the Western Hemisphere.
One major difference between the American South and other slave societies in
the New World was that only in the states of South Carolina and Mississippi
did slaves ever constitute a majority of the population, whereas in the
British and French Caribbean, blacks were 90 percent of inhabitants from 1770
on. Those economies, dependent upon slave imports, always contained a large
number born in Africa and a preponderance of males. Native-born blacks, in
contrast, had dominated the sexually balanced slave population in British
North America since the end of the seventeenth century, and by 1860 they were
all but 1 percent. U.S. slaves were also in closer proximity with whites.
Nearly half worked on holdings of twenty or fewer slaves, whereas in Jamaica,
on the eve of emancipation, onethird of the slaves worked on plantations of
two hundred or more, and three-quarters on plantations of at least fifty.
North American blacks often lived and toiled side-by-side with resident
masters. Many Caribbean planters were absentee owners, residing as far away as
the mother country. Their large holdings were managed by hired agents and
overseers, who had less incentive to maximize the slave's long-term capital
value and more to go after short-term revenues. All of these factors supplied
fewer opportunities and provocations for servile insurrection in the United
States.
Any rebellion faces a severe problem with free riders. Overturning a slave
system presumably benefits all held in bondage, whether they participated in
the rebellion or not. Since revolutionary activity entails enormous personal
risks, each individual slave had an incentive to free ride on the
revolutionary activity of others. Rather than wonder why slave revolts were so
few, we should marvel that they took place at all. The only fully successful
servile insurrection in all of human history was the one in Haiti. Escape, on
the other hand, was a form of resistance that concentrated nearly all its
gains on the individual runaway, except for some external gains that arose
when more frequent running away drove up slavery's security costs.
In addition to insurrection and escape, there were many forms of passive
resistance, and slaveholders and former slaves alike attest that American
blacks tried them all. Shirking, working carelessly, faking illness, being
absent, abusing tools and other property, committing petty "theft," and
feigning stupidity or incompetence were all difficult to prevent or detect.
Sometimes these would shade into more violent protests involving vandalism,
arson, poisoning, or physical confrontation. Each of these stratagems helped
to reduce the master's return from coercing his "troublesome property." They
thereby subtly shifted his ideal mix of rewards and punishments toward
positive incentives, bringing collective benefits for all slaves. If applied
relentlessly and courageously enough, black recalcitrance could encroach on
the peculiar institution's economic viability. A bondsman who could not be
compelled to work very hard was not worth much.
One thing that might have moved slaves from hidden noncooperation to open
revolt was encouragement and assistance from outsiders. But even free blacks
in the North did not wholeheartedly endorse Walker's call for resistance.
Frederick Douglass adhered consistently to the pacifism of Garrison through
most of the 1840s, and his influence caused a National Negro Convention
meeting in Buffalo to reject by a single vote a resolution calling for
slavery's violent overthrow. Nonetheless, as time passed without any withering
away of the peculiar institution, the
acceptance of forceful opposition slowly percolated throughout antislavery
circles.
An unlikely white convert was William Leggett. Editor of the New York Evening
Post, Leggett had been the intellectual inspiration behind the Locofocos, the
local Democratic Party's radical, laissez-faire wing. At first he shared the
prevailing Jacksonian suspicion of abolitionists, because they diverted
attention from the political battle against government privilege. But the New
York journalist's uncompromising support for civil liberties eventually won
him over to antislavery. In one of Leggett's last editorials, appearing in an
1837 issue of the Plaindealer, he admitted that "the oppression which our
fathers suffered from Great Britain was nothing in comparison with that which
the negroes experience at the hands of the slaveholders." Leggett would not
"raise a finger in opposition" if "an extensive and well-arranged insurrection
of the blacks should occur in any of the slave states.... The obligations of
citizenship are strong, but those of justice, humanity and religion stronger."
Indeed, he confessed the "keenest mortification and chagrin" that the U.S.
government would be required under the Constitution to help suppress such an
insurrection and prayed "that the battle might end in giving freedom to the
oppressed."[24]
By the last decade before the war, militancy became commonplace among
abolitionists, and the theorist who carried these revolutionary ideas furthest
was Lysander Spooner. He had always been impatient with the "tame, cowardly,
drivelling, truckling course pursued by the abolitionists" who wasted their
energies "talking to women and children about the churches and the clergy.""
In 1858 he circulated plans for fomenting slave rebellions in the South.
Northern conspirators would assist with money, arms, training, and volunteers.
He hoped that non-slaveowning whites could also be enlisted through the
expropriation of slaveholders' property. With implacable legalistic logic, the
Massachusetts attorney maintained that, rather than being due any
compensation, slaveholders in fact owed compensation to their slaves for past
exploitation. Blacks therefore could justly seize plantations as their own
private property, to parcel out to any who had assisted them. Spooner also
envisaged vigilance committees supplanting southern state and local
governments. He optimistically looked forward to rapid success, if this
insurrection were properly planned, but was also undaunted by the prospect of
protracted guerrilla warfare.
pps. 37-60
--[cont]--
Aloha, He'Ping,
Om, Shalom, Salaam.
Em Hotep, Peace Be,
Omnia Bona Bonis,
All My Relations.
Adieu, Adios, Aloha.
Amen.
Roads End
Kris
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