-Caveat Lector-
an excerpt from:
Emancipating Slaves, Enslaving Freemen
Jeffrey Rogers Hummel©1996
Open Court Publishing
ISBN 0-8126-9311-6
--[2]--
Chapter 2
Bibliographical Essay
The premier work on the economics of U.S. slavery remains Robert William Fogel
and Stanley L. Engerman, Time on the Cross, v. 1, The Economics of American
Negro Slavery; v. 2, Evidence and Methods—A Supplement (Boston: Little, Brown,
1974). Although well-subsidized with government grants, backed up by an army
of research assistants, and relying on what were then the latest computer
techniques to analyze mountains of data, Time on the Cross eventually bore an
"avalanche of criticism," which in the words of Jonathan Hughes, American
Economic History, 3rd edn. (New York: HarperCollins, 1990), pp. 231-32, "in
fineness as well as vigor and volume has rarely been known in the scholarship
of economic history."
As practitioners of the "new economic history" or in fancier terms
"cliometrics," Fogel and Engerman set out to demolish what they called the
"traditional interpretation" of American slavery, which can be thought to have
begun with Ulrich Bonnell Phillips, Negro Slavery: A Survey of the Supply,
Employment and Control of Negro Labor as Determined by the Plantation Regime
(New York: D. Appleton, 1918). Overtly racist, Phillips portrayed slavery as a
civilizing influence on blacks but nonetheless offered the first solid
historical treatment of the subject. On the basis of trends in slave and
cotton prices, he also argued that slavery was unprofitable. Phillips inspired
several state studies that confirmed his evaluation of slavery's
profitability, the most important of which was Charles Sackett Sydnor, Slavery
in Mississippi (New York: Appleton-Century, 1933). Actually, the only
necessary implication of Phillips's claim was that slave prices needed to fall
to equilibrate returns with other investments. But Charles W. Ramsdell, "The
Natural Limits of Slavery Expansion," Mississippi Valley Historical Review, 16
(September 1929), pp. 151-171, came along and concluded that therefore slavery
was economically doomed. It "had reached its limits in both profits and land,"
and this conclusion, in turn, bolstered the revisionist interpretation of the
Civil War as an unfortunate and avoidable calamity.
Meanwhile, Lewis Cecil Gray produced his two-volume History of Agriculture in
the Southern United States to 1860 (Washington: Carnegie Institution, 1933), a
work of such ponderous and overwhelming scholarship that even today there is
hardly an aspect of the antebellum agrarian South on which it is not the
first, and sometimes the last, word. Gray suffered no illusions about
slavery's economic frailty, fully anticipating the cliometricians. Later,
Kenneth M. Stampp gave us The Peculiar Institution: Slavery in the Ante-Bellum
South (New York: Alfred A. Knopf, 1956), still one of the best general works
on American slavery, which replaced Phillips's benign regime with a harsher
picture and, like Gray, concluded that slaveholding was quite profitable.
Other notable contributions that pre-dated Time on the Cross include Stanley
M. Elkins, Slavery: A Problem in American Institutional and Intellectual Life,
1st. edn. (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1959), whose thesis that
American slavery resembled a modern concentration camp stirred up a hornets'
nest; Eugene D. Genovese, The Political Economy of Slavery: Studies in the
Economy & Society of the Slave South (New York: Pantheon Books, 1965), an
analysis from a Marxist historian who argued that slavery was economically
moribund; and John W. Blassingame, The Slave Community: Plantation Life in the
Antebellum South, 1st edn. (New York: Oxford University Press, 1972), which
relied on slave narratives to reconstruct the slave community.
Not Fogel and Engerman themselves, but two other economists, Alfred H. Conrad
and John R. Meyer, actually touched off the cliometric revolution with their
1958 Journal of Political Economy article, "The Economics of Slavery in the
Ante Bellum South," which is reprinted in Fogel and Engerman, eds., The
Reinterpretation of American Economic History (New York: Harper & Row, 197 1),
along with several of Fogel's and Engerman's subsequent articles on slavery.
Conrad and Meyer attempted to prove, empirically and rigorously, that slavery
was indeed remunerative for the slaveowner, and after much back-and-forth
debate in the technical literature, that finding at least was firmly
established.
Fogel and Engerman went much further, however, claiming that slave plantations
were 40 percent more efficient than northern free farms, that planters relied
less heavily on coercion than previously supposed, that historians had
exaggerated slave breeding and the separation of slave families, and that
generally slavery in the South was a model of economic rationality. The best
of the attacks on Time on the Cross can be found conveniently in two volumes:
Herbert G. Gutman, Slavery and the Numbers Game: A Critique of "Time on the
Cross" (Urbana: University of Illinois Press, 1975), and Paul A. David,
Herbert G. Gutman, Richard Sutch, Peter Temin, and Gavin Wright, with an
introduction by Kenneth Stampp, Reckoning with Slavery: A Critical Study in
the Quantitative History of American Negro Slavery (New York: Oxford
University Press, 1976). An economically literate yet readable summary of the
criticisms is Thomas L. Haskell, "The True and Tragical History of 'Time on
the Cross'," New York Review of Books, 22 (2 October 1975), pp. 33-39. Gavin
Wright presents an alternative to Fogel and Engerman's view of the plantation
economy in The Political Economy of the Cotton South: Households, Markets, and
Wealth in the Nineteenth Century (New York: W. W. Norton, 1978), but as Robert
Higgs warns in his review for the Journal of American History, 66 (June 1979),
p. 153, Wright is an economist prone to "the construction of heavy deductive
structures on factual quicksands" and therefore must be approached with some
caution, perhaps with as much as Fogel and Engerman.
And what is the final verdict after all this controversy? My admittedly
impressionistic judgment is that it depends upon whether you ask professional
historians or economists. Most historians would agree with Eugene Genovese's
appraisal that Time on the Cross was a "creative failure." Peter Kolchin,
professor of history at the University of Delaware, in "More Time on the
Cross? An Evaluation of Robert William Fogel's Without Consent of Contract,"
Journal of Southern History, 58 (August 1992), pp. 491-501, reports that Fogel
and Engerman are left "with few defenders among professional historians"; Time
on the Cross "was a flash in the pan, a bold but now discredited work that
added little to the important stream of slavery revisionism that welled forth
in the 1970s."
The verdict of professional economists, in contrast, can be gauged by Fogel's
sharing the 1993 Nobel prize in economics. They generally seem to believe that
subsequent research sustained Time on the Cross. For instance, Donald
McCloskey, a professionally trained economist at the University of Iowa, in
"Little Things Matter" [a review of Fogel's Without Consent or Contract],
Reason, 22 (June 1990), pp. 51-53, reports that Fogel and Engerman "won the
debate, demonstrating beyond scientific doubt what was merely plausible in
1974." This dichotomy is symptomatic of the hyperspecialization of modern
academe, with the two disciplines failing to talk to each other enough.
Among the significant general works on American slavery since Time on the
Cross, we should mention Eugene D. Genovese, Roll, Jordan, Roll. The World the
Slaves Made (New York: Pantheon Books, 1974); Leslie Howard Owens, This
Species of Property: Slave Life and Culture in the Old South (New York: Oxford
University Press, 1976); James Oakes, The Ruling Race: A
History of American Slaveholders (New York: Alfred A. Knopf, 1982); John B.
Boles, Black Southerners' 1619-1869 (Lexington: University Press of Ken-tucky,
1983); and Oakes, Slavery and Freedom. - An Interpretation of the Old South
(New York: Alfred A. Knopf, 1990). This list hardly scratches the surface,
because I am here concerned with slavery's political economy, but
those who wish to delve deeply into other aspects should either consult the
bibliography (recommended in our first chapter) from Peter Kolchin's survey,
American Slavery, 1619-1877, or peruse Peter J. Parish's very fine
historiographical volume, Slavery: History and the Historians (New York:
Harper & Row, 1989).
Recently Fogel has returned to the fray with a new work: Without Consent or
Contract. The Rise and Fall of American Slavery (New York: W. W. Norton,
1989). Reinforced this time by no less than three supporting volumes,
subtitled Evidence and Methods; Technical Papers: Markets and Production; and
Technical Papers: Conditions of Slave Life and the Transition to Freedom
(although two of these supplements mainly reprint previously published
articles), the text of Without Consent or Contract itself is really two
separate books cleaved together. In the first half Fogel silently revises the
more egregious faux pas in Time on the Cross and softens his tone while
maintaining the same general economic evaluation of American slavery. The
second half of Fogel's new book is an unexceptional but wide-ranging history
of the antislavery movements in Britain and America.
Mainly theoretical works on the economics of slavery include John R. Hicks, A
Theory of Economic History (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1969), chapter 8; Evsey
D. Domar, "The Causes of Slavery or Serfdom: A Hypothesis," Journal of
Economic History, 30 (March 1970), pp. 18-32; Robert Evans, Jr., "Some Notes
on Coerced Labor," Journal of Economic History, 30 (December 1970), pp.
861-66; Theodore Berstrom, "On the Existence and Optimality of Competitive
Equilibrium in a Slave Economy," Review of Economic Studies, 38 (January
1971), pp. 23-36; Stanley L. Engerman, Some Considerations Relating to
Property Rights in Man," Journal of Economic History, 33 (March 1973), pp.
43-65; Giorgio Cannarella and John Tomaske, "The Optimal Utilization of
Slaves," Journal of Political Economy, 35 (September 1975), pp. 621-29; Ronald
Findlay, "Slavery, Incentives, and Manumission: A Theoretical Model," Journal
of Political Economy, 83 (October 1975), pp. 923-933; Yoram Barzel, "An
Economic Analysis of Slavery," Journal of Law and Economics, 20 (April 1977),
pp. 87-110; and Stefano Fenoaltea, "Slavery and Supervision in Comparative
Perspective: A Model," Journal of Economic History, 44 (September 1984), pp.
635-668.
With the notable exception, however, of Fenoaltea's brilliantly conceived and
executed analysis in the last cited article, I have found the most
enlightening theoretical contributions to have been unjustifiably ignored by
both sides of the Time on the Cross debate: viz., Ludwig von Mises, "The Work
of Animals and of Slaves," in Human Action: A Treatise on Economics, 3rd edn.
(Chicago: Regnery, 1960), pp. 628-634; John E. Moes, "The Economics of Slavery
in the Ante Bellum South: Another Comment," Journal of Political Economy, 68
(April 1960), 183-87; Moes, "Comment," National Bureau of Economic Research,
Aspects of Labor Economics: A Conference of the Universities-National Bureau
Committee for Economic Research (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press,
1962); Gordon Tullock, "The Political Economy of Slavery: Genovese and Davis,"
Left and Right, 3 (Spring-Summer 1967), pp. 5 -16; Thomas Sowell, "The
Economics of Slavery," chapter 5 in Markets and Minorities (New York: Basic
Books, 198 1). Also important is Mark Thornton's recent "Slavery,
Profitability, and the Market Process" Review of Austrian Economics, 7 (1994),
pp. 21-47.
Most of these neglected contributions follow in the classical tradition of
Adam Smith, who included some critical remarks about slavery in An Inquiry
Into the Nature and Causes of the Wealth of Nations (Indianapolis:
LibertyClassics, 1976), v. 1, pp. 386-390. This tradition reached its apogee
with the indictment of American slavery by John Elliot Cairnes, a nineteenth-
century British economist and abolitionist, in The Slave Power. its Character,
Career, and Probable Designs: Being an Attempt to Explain the Real Issues
Involved in the American Contest, 2nd edn. (London: Macmillan, 1863). The
classical economists tended to conclude that bound labor was always less
physically productive than free labor because they implicitly assumed that
slavery operated like a tax on work. They were not sufficiently attuned to the
fact that slavery's coercion not only taxed the slave's work and passed the
proceeds on to the slaveholder, but also operated like a tax on the slave's
leisure, causing the slave to work more or harder than otherwise. This feature
is what made slavery particularly attractive when labor was scarcer in
relation to land, such as in the New World. Fogel and Engerman veer in the
opposite direction, almost concluding that slavery is always more physically
productive, and then they mistakenly apply the welfare term "efficiency" to
this overproduction generated by a labor misallocation.
Stefano Fenoaltea, "The Slavery Debate: A Note From the Sidelines,"
Explorations in Economic History, 18 (July 1981), pp. 304-08, was one of the
first to expose the logical tension between Fogel and Engerman's conclusions
about the productivity of slavery and how well slaves were treated. If slave
labor was more physically productive in agriculture than free labor, this
could not possibly be the consequence of planters using positive incentives,
because those are the precise incentives slavery has in common with free
labor. The ability to coerce the slave is its only possible advantage over
free labor. Without admitting as much, Fogel has incorporated this correction
into Without Consent or Contract.
My own approach in this chapter is not fully consonant with either Fogel and
Engerman or their critics. Most economists will immediately recognize that I
have simply taken the standard analysis of political rentseeking and applied
it to slavery. Some, however, might object to my suggestion that welfare
economics depends upon translating all transfers into money and assuming that
the marginal dollar is of equal value to everyone. John R. Hicks and Nicholas
Kaldor are supposed to have overcome the problem of comparing utility between
individuals with what is known as a "potential Pareto improvement." But I have
been convinced by David D. Friedman's arguments in Price Theory: An
Intermediate Text, 2nd edn. (Cincinnati: South-Western, 1990), chapter 15,
"Economic Efficiency," and in "Does Altruism Produce Efficient Outcomes?
Marshall Versus Kaldor," Journal of Legal Studies, 17 (January 1988), pp. 1-
13, that the Hicks-Kaldor criterion hides its implicit comparisons behind a
confusing veil of words about how the gainers "could have compensated" the
losers but did not. If no compensation is actually accepted or turned down,
there is no way to know if it was sufficient unless we make an interpersonal
utility comparison. Without the assumption that the subjective value of the
marginal dollar is equal for everyone, welfare economics can say almost
nothing -positive or negative-about transfers, whether through private theft,
government intervention, or outright enslavement. Those critics of Fogel and
Engerman, such as Paul David and Peter Temin, who argue that welfare economics
is completely irrelevant to slavery, do not seem to realize that their
objection would also rule out a welfare analysis of any government policies,
including tariffs or tax-financed public goods. See also Murray N. Rothbard,
"Toward a Reconstruction of Utility and Welfare Economics," in Mary Sennholz,
ed., On Freedom and Free Enterprise: Essays in Honor of Ludwig von Mises
(Princeton, NJ: D. Van Nostrand, 1956).
Strictly speaking, this chapter has shown only that southern slavery was
inefficient compared to a Pareto-optimal labor market-not compared to the
actual labor market that might have existed had the South abolished the
peculiar institution. Someone could argue that free labor would have been less
efficient in the real world because of potential market failures that
slavery overcame, and indeed, Engerman skirts toward this argument when he
refers in "Some Considerations Relating to Property Rights in Man" to
slavery's possible reduction of certain transaction costs. I stand ready to
revise my evaluation of slavery's efficiency when a more developed
presentation comes along. A similar but more plausible approach could pick on
government failures in the Old South's labor market. Occupational restrictions
on free blacks were inefficient, and if slaves could be admitted into jobs
from which blacks otherwise were excluded, then to that extent slavery reduced
inefficiencies.
This chapter has also over-simplified the pay-offs from manumission through
self-purchase. Even monetary gains (let alone non-pecuniary psychic gains) are
not confined to cases where the slave could earn a higher income once free-
because coercion costs the master something too, but unlike the payments for a
slave's subsistence, these costs are not passed on to the slave. With the
master's savings from eliminating enforcement costs, the freed slave no longer
has to be both willing and able to earn an income that exceeds the value of
his output as a slave. For there to be monetary gains from self-purchase, the
former slave's future income must merely exceed that total minus the cost of
coercing him. On the other hand, I have also ignored any transaction costs
associated with the slave's financing his self-purchase, which push required
post-manumission income in the opposite direction. What factor predominates is
impossible to know a priori.
John Moes has implied in "The Economics of Slavery and the Ante Bellum South"
that manumission through self-purchase may have been theoretically viable even
for field hands. He points out in a footnote that "the relevant comparison is
not that between the productivity of a free man and a slave but between the
productivity of a slave with and without the hope of freedom." In other words,
the wage required to induce free laborers to do plantation work is not
necessarily the lowest wage that slaves would have accepted if offered a
chance to buy their freedom. This does raise an important puzzle. Why would
field hands not be willing voluntarily to do the same work in return for less
than their current implicit wages with their liberty thrown into the bargain?
Engerman and others have suggested one possible answer. The high wage demanded
by free laborers indicates that these were the very jobs where negative
incentives dominated positive incentives. We could therefore reasonably expect
that the implicit wage (including what field hands are allowed to consume in
leisure) was already close enough to subsistence to leave the slave very
little to offer in exchange for freedom. I find much more probable an
explanation hinted at by Fenoaltea. The debt contract of the field hand who
purchases his own freedom is more costly to enforce than outright enslavement,
in light of the fact that the former slave has almost as much incentive and
much more opportunity to evade paying the debt than to escape slavery. The
fact that this was an era of imprisonment for unpaid. debts lends further
credence to this explanation.
I have provisionally accepted many of Fogel and Engerman's numerical
estimates, not because I am convinced that they are flawless, but because few
alternatives are available, and moreover, even significant changes would not
alter much my theoretical conclusion -completely at odds with Fogel and
Engerman—that slavery entailed significant deadweight loss. Taking a more
convoluted route to the same place, two articles have tried to show that
slavery dampened saving in the Old South: John E. Moes, "The Absorption of
Capital in Slave Labor in the Ante Bellum South and Economic Growth," American
Journal of Economics and Sociology, 20 (October 1961), pp. 535-541, and Roger
L. Ransom and Richard Sutch, "Capitalists Without Capital: The Burden of
Slavery and the Impact of Emancipation," Agricultural History, 62 (Summer
1988), pp. 133-160. These authors make the intriguing observation that whereas
the costs of raising free children are consumption expenditures for the
parents, those same costs for slave children appear to slaveowners as
investment expenditures. Therefore, even if people in the slave states did
save the same proportion of their aggregate income as those in the free
states, less ended up actually invested in physical capital because of this
antebellum analog to the "bond illusion" some economists think modern
government debt generates. Engerman, on the other hand, speculates in "Some
Considerations Relating to Property Rights in Man" that slavery may have
raised savings by permitting slaveholders to capture more of the externalities
associated with the formation of human capital. I remain agnostic over the
secondary issue of how slavery may have affected southern saving; either way
its deadweight loss necessarily constituted a significant welfare burden.
Like the classic prisoners' dilemma, slavery created an incentive structure
where slaveholders gained from making society worse off. Even Fogel and
Engerman acknowledge that the coercive transfers received by masters were less
than the damages inflicted on slaves. A trickier question is how this
negative-sum redistribution affected non-slaveholding whites in the South.
Unfortunately, quantifying the answer would require a more rigorous, empirical
study. Although Time on the Cross correctly identifies the consumers of cotton
clothing as the ultimate beneficiaries of slavery's increased output, there no
doubt were others. If worldwide demand for southern cotton was elastic,
imported goods were cheaper for all Americans. Whites with scarce talents
complementary to slavery, e.g., the overseer who was not nearly as good at
anything else, had higher salaries. Owners of land suited to slave agriculture
were also wealthier. These gains to non-slaveholders must be offset against
the losses they suffered from externalized enforcement costs and misallocated
black labor.
If the peculiar institution made non-slaveholding whites in the South poorer,
the result would not necessarily appear in the average income of white
Southerners, because white slaveowners were made richer. Richard A. Easterlin
was the first to construct income estimates for the various regions of the
United States in "Regional Income Trends, 1840-1950," reprinted in The
Reinterpretation of American Economic History. His figures for the South have
been challenged by Gerald Gunderson, "Southern Ante-Bellum Income
Reconsidered," Explorations in Economic History, 10 (Winter 1973), pp.
151-176. Fogel and Engerman already had refined Easterlin's estimates, picking
out the South's rapid growth between 1840 and 1860 as evidence of slavery's
efficiency. My interpretation, as the text makes clear, is just the opposite.
These numbers show the South still one-third poorer than the North despite the
fact that slavery artificially raised southern output. The authors of Time on
the Cross also compare the free populations of the two regions. According to
their numbers, leaving out slaves results in a slight northern lead in per
capita income in 1840 but a reversal of that in 1860, $150 for the South as
compared with $144 for the North. These numbers, however, assume that slaves
consumed only $20 per year. Since this does not jibe with the contention in
Time on the Cross, v. 2, p. 117, that annual per capita income for slaves
averaged $34.13, it is hard to understand why Fogel and Engerman settled on a
$20 adjustment (even though it did yield a slightly lower rate of economic
growth for the South) and continue to do so as recently as Fogel's Without
Consent or Contract.
If free income per capita is recalculated using higher slave consumption, the
North maintains its lead for 1860 as well. In other words, not only were all
Southerners, free and slave, on average poorer, but also free Southerners were
on average poorer than Northerners, despite the planters' exploitation of the
slaves. This seems to confirm that the losses of non-slaveholders far exceeded
their gains. What may be more telling is the net internal migration from South
to North. Free laborers do not generally move from economies where wages are
high to where wages are lower.
Leonard Liggio of the Institute for Humane Studies first suggested to me the
importance of the Constitution's fugitive slave clause to slavery's
enforcement costs. Fogel in Without Consent or Contract, p. 39, is aware that
slavery "flourished only where political and legal conditions kept the cost of
operating gang-system plantations low." But he never goes on to explore fully
how those political and legal preconditions affected slavery's efficiency.
Indeed, much of the historical and theoretical work on slavery proceeds as if
enforcement costs were zero. Theodore Berstrom, for instance, in "On the
Existence and Optimality of Competitive Equilibrium in a Slave Economy," gives
a general-equilibrium model that is rigorously mathematical but that
implicitly makes this erroneous assumption.
A recognition of slavery's enforcement costs may shed light on the ultimately
sterile debate over whether we refer to planters as "seigniorial" or
"capitalistic." Genovese, a Marxist historian, has been the most emphatic in
labeling southern planters as a pre-capitalist, paternalistic class, whereas
Fogel and Engerman go furthest in viewing them as modern, rational
businessmen. Bear in mind that every producer of goods and services is a
consumer as well. Except among the economically selfsufficient, most
production is for markets and thus faces outside discipline. Those who fail to
heed the market cannot maintain their wealth for long, whether they are
slaveowning planters or modern corporate executives. With respect to their
purely productive activities, therefore, planters were necessarily market-
oriented. As consumers, on the other hand, slaveholders could indulge whatever
preferences their wealth permitted. These were obviously influenced by culture
and may very well have been pre-capitalist, however we wish to define that
term.
What Genovese and the historians who share his view of the paternalistic
South, however, seem to have in mind is the planters' ability to escape market
discipline through political power. Nearly all producers, under all social
systems, turn to the State for subsidies and other special privileges. Some
are more successful than others, but the South's large planters were among the
successful. They had to be, because as they were well aware, slavery's
economic viability depended upon political power. And in their ability to
socialize slavery's enforcement costs, slaveholders do strikingly resemble
feudal lords or mercantilist magnates.
One dispute I did not even try to address was the relative productivity of
free farms versus slave plantations. Many critics, especially David and Temin,
have rightly dismissed Fogel and Engerman's calculations of relative
productivity as theoretically untenable. The correct procedure would have
required plugging in physical quantities of inputs and outputs to compare
factor productivity between the regions. Since northern free farms produced no
cotton, Fogel and Engerman had to fall back on the monetary value of differing
outputs, which completely invalidates any results.
The debate nevertheless has some interesting implications about whether
plantation slavery forced its field hands to work longer or harder. Fogel and
Engerman believe that slaves worked more intensely rather than more hours, and
this greater intensity resulted from the significant economies of scale they
allege that cotton cultivation enjoyed. The large plantations, which used
slave gangs exclusively, were much more productive per hour of labor than
small slaveholdings in the South or even free farms in the North. Gavin Wright
and others have countered that cotton production only enjoyed constant returns
to scales. My best guess would be that any real economies of scale inhered in
the costs of coercion rather than in cotton growing per se. A single overseer
could cow twenty slaves nearly as easily and cheaply as one slave. Cannarella
and Tomaske imply as much in "The Optimal Utilization of Slaves" when they
misleadingly refer to the external economies of using force. I say
"misleadingly" because these are not true externalities unless they operated
across plantations. After all, one of the main reasons large firms, including
plantations, exist in the first place is because they capture gains that would
be otherwise out of reach.
A necessary theoretical implication of Fogel and Engerman's conclusion, which
they fully recognize, is that free laborers could have earned higher hourly
wages working in gangs on plantations than working on small family farms.
Fogel and Engerman point to the psychic benefits of being self-employed on
one's own land to explain why these higher wages could not attract any free
laborers. But this will not do. If plantations in fact could offer higher
wages, they did not have to bid away all free farmers but just some workers at
the margin. To argue that almost none could be enticed in an era in which over
three million immigrants took risky voyages
across the Atlantic just for slight expected increases in real wages is
wildly implausible. In effect, Fogel and Engerman have replaced the old
argument that planters were maintaining the slave system by unprofitable
conspicuous consumption with a new argument in which free farmers (and free
blacks after emancipation) become the irrational conspicuous consumers. One
does not have to wholeheartedly embrace the efficient markets and rational
expectations of the New Classical economists to realize, as John Moes has so
aptly put it (in another context in his comment for Aspects of Labor
Economics, p. 248) that "the assumption that people will attempt to maximize"
is far less heroic than "some of the assumptions that have to be made in the
calculation process" to arrive at Fogel and Engerman's results.
In short, Kenneth Stampp got it backwards in Reckoning With Slavery, p.30,
when he accused Fogel and Engerman of "a desire to make everything fit
comfortably in a neo-classical behavioral model." Quite the opposite! Their
problem is not being neo-classical enough. Fogel, in particular, views
coercion and wages as merely two alternative ways to motivate workers. Free
labor during this period often "is to the modern mind still brutal and
exploitative" (Without Consent or Contract, p. 388). Thus his analysis fails
to comprehend the fundamental economic distinction between a voluntary
transaction, which with its mutual gains moves the transactors toward greater
efficiency and welfare (given initial endowments), and a coercive transfer,
which with its nearly inevitable deadweight loss must reduce efficiency and
welfare. (Admittedly, if voluntary transactions impose costs on third parties,
this may reduce efficiency. The slave trade itself, for instance, benefited
the trading parties only by inflicting harm on the slave. But as this extreme
instance illustrates, serious negative externalities usually arise from a link
between a voluntary transaction and a coercive transfer.)
This conceptual failure leaves Fogel pathetically ill-equipped to make a moral
case against slavery. The best he can marshal, in the Afterword of Without
Consent or Contract, is a four-part indictment resting on slavery's
"unrestrained personal domination" (whatever that means, domination being more
vague a concept than coercion) and its denial to blacks of economic
opportunity, citizenship, and cultural autonomy. If these are really the worst
things that Fogel can say against slavery, no wonder he has trouble finding a
qualitative difference between it and free labor. William Lloyd Garrison and
the other radical abolitionists, in contrast, did clearly recognize such a
qualitative difference, and to that extent, they exhibited a far more profound
appreciation of the economic way of thinking.
To return to historical works, a brief but measured comparison of slavery in
the United States with slavery elsewhere is David Brion Davis, "Slavery," in
C. Vann Woodward, ed., The Comparative Approach to American History (New York:
Basic Books, 1968). There are also more details in the first of Davis's
intellectual histories, The Problem of Slavery in Western Culture (cited ch.
1). The slim volume that kicked off the debate on where in the New World
slavery was the most horrible is Frank Tannenbaum, Slave and Citizen: The
Negro in the Americas (New York: Alfred A. Knopf, 1946). Two further
contributions to this debate are Herbert S. Klein, Slavery in the Americas: A
Comparative Study of Virginia and Cuba (Chicago: University of Chicago Press,
1967), and Carl N. Degler, Neither Black nor White: Slavery and Race Relations
in Brazil and the United States (New York: Macmillan, 197 1). See also Richard
S. Dunn, Sugar and Slaves: The Rise of the Planter Class in the English West
Indies, 1624-1713 (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 1972), and
Herbert S. Klein, African Slavery in Latin America and the Caribbean (New
York: Oxford University Press, 1986).
Eugene D. Genovese, From Rebellion to Revolution: Afro-American Slave Revolts
in the Making of the New World (Baton Rouge: Louisiana State University Press,
1979), tries to answer the question of why there were fewer slave revolts in
the United States. Very insightful on the general subject of slave resistance
is George M. Fredrickson and Christopher Lasch, "Resistance to Slavery," a
Civil War History article that has been reprinted in one of the most useful
collections on American slavery: Allen Weinstein and Frank Otto Gatell, eds.,
American Negro Slavery: A Modern Reader, 2nd edn., (New York: Oxford
University Press, 1973). Almon Wheeler Lauber, Indian Slavery in Colonial
Times Within the Present Limits of the United States (New York: Columbia
University, 1913), is the standard work on that subject. For the role of
fugitive blacks in the U.S. government's most expensive Indian war, see
Kenneth Porter, "Negroes and the Seminole War, 1835-1842," Journal of Southern
History, 30 (November 1964), pp. 427-450.
For my knowledge of slavery in the ancient and medieval worlds, I have relied
on William L. Westermann, The Slave Systems of Greek and Roman Antiquity
(Philadelphia: American Philosophical Society, 1955); Moses 1. Finley, ed.,
Slavery in Classical Antiquity: Views and Controversies (Cambridge, U.K.: W.
Heffer & Sons, 1960); chapter 3 of Finley, The Ancient Economy, 2nd edn.
(Berkeley: University of California Press, 1973); Garlan Yvon, Slavery in
Ancient Greece, rev. edn., (Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press, 1982); and
William D. Phillips, Jr., Slavery From Roman Times to the Early Transatlantic
Trade (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1985). A. M. Duff, Freedmen
in the Early Roman Empire (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1928), contains valuable
information on Roman manumission, while Moses 1. Finley, Ancient Slavery and
Modem Ideology (London: Chatto & Windus, 1980), makes direct comparisons
between ancient and New World slavery.
Some recent works on slavery in black Africa are Paul E. Lovejoy,
Transformations in Slavery: A History of Slavery in Africa (Cambridge, U.K.:
Cambridge University Press, 1983), and Robin Law, The Slave Coast of West
Africa, 1550-1750: The Impact of Atlantic Slave Trade on an African Society
(Oxford: Clarendon Press, 199 1). David W. Galenson, Traders, Planters, and
Slaves: Market Behavior in Early English America (Cambridge, U.K.: Cambridge
University Press, 1986), does a cliometric analysis of the Atlantic slave
trade at the time of Royal African Company's monopoly and finds the trade
still quite competitive. Orlando Patterson, Slavery and Social Death: A
Comparative Study (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1982), is a
masterly comparative study that draws from the history of slavery in nearly
all periods and places.
The little that is known about manumission through self-purchase in the
United States can be found in Sumner Eliot Matison, "Manumission by Purchase,"
Journal of Negro History, 33 (April 1948), pp. 146-167, and in sections of
Luther P. Jackson, "Manumission in Certain Virginia Cities," Journal of Negro
History, 15 (July 1930), pp. 278-314. Most of the recent works on southern
slave codes and their barriers to manumission -such as Andrew Fede, People
Without Rights: An Interpretation of the Law of Slavery in the U.S. South (New
York: Garland, 1992); Alan Watson, Slave Law in the Americas (Athens:
University of Georgia Press, 1989); and Mark V. Tushnet, The American Law of
Slavery, 1810-1860: Considerations of Humanity and Interest (Princeton, NJ:
Princeton University Press, 198 1) -have fascinating interpretations but are
narrowly focused on special issues. Only Thomas D. Morris's new Southern
Slavery and the Law, 1619-1860 (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina
Press, 1996), is truly comprehensive and definitive.
The South's compulsory slave patrols are one of the gaping holes in the
slavery literature, and what has been written, quite understandably, tends to
be concerned more with the patrol's impact on the slaves than on free whites.
Besides brief sections in such general works on slavery as Kenneth Stampp's
and Leslie Howard Owens's, there are good discussions in John Anthony Scott,
"Segregation: A Fundamental Aspect of Southern Race Relations, 1800-1860,"
Journal of the Early Republic, 4 (Winter 1984), pp. 421-442; Peter H. Wood,
Black Majority: Negroes in Colonial South Carolina From 1670 Through the Stono
Rebellion (New York: Alfred A. Knopf, 1974); John Hope Franklin, The Militant
South, 1800-1861 (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1956), pp. 72-76;
and Howell M. Henry, The Police Control of the Slave in South Carolina (Emory,
VA: H. M. Henry, 1914), pp. 28-42.
Studies of the general management of plantation slaves include William
Kaufmann Scarborough, The Overseen Plantation Management in the Old South
(Baton Rouge: Louisiana State University Press, 1966), and William L. Van
Deburg, The Slave Drivers: Black Agricultural Labor Supervisors in the
Antebellum South (Westport, CT: Greenwood Press, 1979). Michael Tadman,
Speculators and Slaves: Masters, Traders, and Slaves in the Old South
(Madison: University of Wisconsin Press, 1989), covers the workings of the
domestic slave trade. An essential state study that verifies the retreat of
slavery from the South's borders is Barbara Jeanne Fields, Slavery and Freedom
on the Middle Ground: Maryland During the Nineteenth Century (New Haven: Yale
University Press, 1985). John H. Moore, "Simon Gray, Riverman: A Slave Who Was
Almost Free," Mississippi Valley Historical Review, 49 (December 1962), pp.
472-484, provided my information on that unusual case.
Varied. perspectives on slaves in southern cities and factories can be found
in Richard C. Wade, Slavery in the Cities: The South 1820-1860 (London:
Oxford, 1964); Robert S. Starobin, Industrial Slavery in the Old South (New
York: Oxford University Press, 1970); Claudia Dale Goldin, Urban Slavery in
the American South, 1820-1860: A Quantitative History (Chicago: University of
Chicago Press, 1976); Ronald L. Lewis, Coal, Iron and Slaves: Industrial
Slavery in Maryland and Virginia, 1715-1865 (Westport, CT: Greenwood Press,
1979); and Fred Batemen and Thomas Weiss, A Deplorable Scarcity: The Failure
of Industrialization in the Slave Economy (Chapel Hill: University of North
Carolina Press, 198 1). Whether justifiable of not, many Southerners did
exhibit a sense of inferiority about their relative lack of industry, often
blaming the North. Robert Royal Russel, Economic Aspects of Southern
Sectionalism, 1840-1861 (New York: Russell and Russell, 1960), details
concrete manifestations of this reaction.
At least with respect to the tariff's adverse impact, Southerners not only
were absolutely correct but displayed a sophisticated understanding of
economics. Cliometricians have been tireless in their efforts to discover if
the antebellum tariff did indeed fit one of those rare exceptions where it
might have raised American income overall. See Paul David, "Learning by Doing
and Tariff Protection: A Reconsideration of the Case of the Ante-Bellum United
States Textile Industry," Journal of Economic History, 30 (September 1970),
pp. 521-601; Clayne L. Pope, "The impact of the Ante-Bellum Tariff on Income
Distribution," Explorations in Economic History, 9 (Summer 1972), pp. 375-42
1; Bennett D. Baack and Edward J. Ray, "Tariff Policy and Income Distribution:
The Case of the United States, 1830-1860," Explorations in Economic History,
11 (Winter 1973/74), pp. 103-12 1; John A. James, "The Welfare Effects of the
Antebellum Tariff: A General Equilibrium Analysis," Explorations in Economic
History, 15 (July 1978), pp. 231-256; James, "The Optimal Tariff in the
Antebellum United States," American Economic Review, 71 (September 198 1), pp.
726-734; and Mark Bils, "Tariff Protection and Production in the Early U.S.
Cotton Textile Industry," Journal of Economic History, 44 (December 1984),
1033-045.
After all this effort, we can be confident of the conclusion rendered in two
articles by C. Knick Harley: "International Competitiveness of the Antebellum
American Cotton Textile Industry," Journal of Economic History, 52 (September
1992), pp. 559-584, and "The Antebellum Tariff: Food Exports and
Manufacturing," Explorations in Economic History, 29 (October 1992), pp.
375-400. The tariff was inefficient; it not only redistributed wealth from
farmers and planters to manufacturers and laborers but overall made the
country poorer. Jonathan J. Pincus, Pressure Groups and Politics in Antebellum
Tariffs (New York: Columbia University Press, 1977), is a public-choice
analysis of the special interests that clamored for protection. All these
studies supersede John G. Van Deusen's earlier but still valuable effort to
calculate the Economic Bases of Disunion in South Carolina (New York: Columbia
University Press, 1928).
Among general works on the antebellum American economy, still unreplaced are
the two volumes from The Economic History of the United States series: George
Rogers Taylor, The Transportation Revolution, 1815-1860 (New York: Holt,
Rinehart, and Winston, 1951), and Paul W. Gates, The Farmer's Age:
Agriculture, 1815-1860 (New York: Holt, Rinehart, and Winston, 1960). Douglass
C. North, The Economic Growth of the United States, 1790-1860 (New York:
Prentice Hall, 1961), a more recent work from one of the first of the new
economic historians, emphasizes the role of cotton in driving northern
industrialization. For organizational details on that industrialization,
examine Thomas C. Cochran, Frontiers of Change: Early Industrialism in America
(New York: Oxford University Press, 198 1). A brief, somewhat dated
historiographical essay is Peter Temin, Causal Factors, in American Economic
Growth in the Nineteenth Century (London: Macmillan Press, 1975). Far more
thorough and up to date is Jeremy Atack and Peter Passell, A New Economic View
of American History: From Colonial Times to 1940, 2nd edn. (New York: W. W.
Norton, 1994), a textbook on the new economic history that devotes a good
number of chapters to the antebellum United States, although I do not always
share its judgments.
Perhaps some of the cliometricians could turn their attention to the question
of how many slaves escaped north, which urgently needs to be reassessed. The
most often cited work on the underground railroad, Larry Gara, The Liberty
Line: The Legend of the Underground Railroad (Lexington: University of
Kentucky Press, 1961), contends that its accomplishments were highly
overrated. But Gara seems to have an anti-abolitionist ax to grind, and it is
surprising that his findings have been accepted so uncritically, especially
after the dean of historians of abolitionism, Louis Filler, in his review of
Gara's book, Mississippi Valley Historical Review, 48 (December 1961), pp.
523-24, expressed grave reservations, finding it "unlikely to content the
numerous investigators whose articles and new evidence continue to underwrite
the view that the underground railroad was as real and important as the
sponsors of the Fugitive Slave Act believed." Gara dismisses the earlier, more
glowing volumes, Wilbur H. Siebert, The Underground Railroad from Slavery to
Freedom (New York: Macmillan, 1898), and William Still, The Underground Rail
Road: A Record of Facts, Authentic Narratives, Letters, etc., Narrating the
Hardships, Hair-Breadth Escapes and Death Struggles of the Slaves in Their
Efforts for Freedom (Philadelphia: Porter & Coates, 1872), but Siebert and
Still did have the one advantage of interviewing actual participants. One of
the few books on the subject to appear since Gara's is Charles L. Blockson,
The Underground Railroad (New York: Prentice Hall, 1987), a solid compilation
of case histories. Also Stanley Harrold, The Abolitionists and the South,
1831-1861 (Lexington: University Press of Kentucky, 1995), has an excellent
chapter on those abolitionists who risked capture below the Mason-Dixon line
to rescue slaves.
Thomas D. Morris, Free Men All: The Personal Liberty Laws of the North,
1780-1861 (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1974), recounts the
history of free states' personal liberty laws. A thorough discussion of
additional legal and constitutional issues related to fugitive slaves is Paul
Finkelman, An Imperfect Union: Slavery, Federalism, and Comity (Chapel Hill:
University of North Carolina Press, 1981); while his Civil War History
article, "Prigg v. Pennsylvania and Northern State Courts: Anti-Slavery Uses
of a Pro-Slavery Decision," reprinted in Kermit L. Hall, The Law of American
Slavery: Major Historical Interpretations (New York: Garland, 1987), examines
in depth that major Supreme Court case. For the legal dilemma confronting
antislavery judges, see Robert M. Cover, Justice Accused: Antislavery and the
Judicial Process (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1975).
Vincent Harding, There Is a River. The Black Struggle for Freedom in America
(New York: Harcourt Brace Jovanovich, 1981), covers the entire range of black
resistance, South and North; while Merton L. Dillon, Slavery Attacked:
Southern Slaves and Their Allies, 1619-1865 (Baton Rouge: Louisiana State
University Press, 1990), looks at outside encouragement and support for slave
revolts. For more on David Walker and the evolving attitude of abolitionists
toward violence, the general works on abolitionism mentioned in the previous
chapter are still relevant, along with the works on John Brown mentioned below
in chapter 4. Unfortunately, there is no book-length biography of Lysander
Spooner. Background information can be found in the chapter about him from
James J. Mar-tin, Men Against the State: The Expositors of Individualist
Anarchism in America, 1827-1908 (DeKalb, IL: Adrian Allen Associates, 1953),
and the short biography from the first volume of Charles Shively, ed., The
Collected Works of Lysander Spooner (Weston, MA: M & S Press, 197 1). Details
about Spooner's circular on slave insurrection, along with discussions of the
abolitionists' growing militancy, are contained in Lewis Perry, Radical
Abolitionism, an important work from last chapter's bibliographical essay;
Betram Wyatt-Brown, "William Lloyd Garrison and Antislavery Unity: A
Reappraisal," in Robert P. Swierenga, ed., Beyond the Civil War Synthesis:
Political Essays on the Civil War Era (Westport, CT: Greenwood Press, 1975), a
collection of assorted articles on politics that originally appeared in Civil
War History,- and Herbert Aptheker, To Be Free: Studies in American Negro
History, 2nd edn. (New York: International, 1968), which in addition to its
essay on "Militant Abolitionism" also contains useful essays on maroon bands
in the South and slaves purchasing their own liberty.
-----
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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