Slavery and American Economic Development

Introduction: What Was Slavery?

Introduction What Was Slavery? When Abraham Lincoln said, “if slavery is not wrong, then nothing is wrong,” he neatly epitomized the tendency to think of slavery as an absolute category, a standard by which all other evils are overshadowed. This conception , often implicit, has a powerful hold on Americans down to the present day. It infuses most writing in American history, even in an age with little sympathy or respect for any number of other long-entrenched orthodoxies. To be sure, the hegemony of antislavery thinking does not stop the occasional flirtation with relativism, using arguments familiar to antebellum apologists: slaves had no risk of unemployment or starvation, there were many other forms of unfreedom in earlier times, and material conditions among slaves in the United States were relatively favorable, as reflected in high rates of population growth. But such unthinkable thoughts gain attention mainly because they are shocking. When moral issues are raised, the evil of slavery is taken as axiomatic. The resulting shallowness of thought was well described at a session of the Southern Historical Association, when Barbara Fields observed that few of her students could “last two minutes in the ring” against the most mediocre proslavery apologists from the Old South. Don’t worry. It is not the purpose of these essays to reopen the antebellum debate over the morality of slavery. There is, however, a parallel problem in economics and economic history, namely the impulse to identify properties of “slavery” as an organizational form or system of production, 1 2 / Slavery and american Economic development as though that term stood for a clearly defined, well-understood economic arrangement, to be contrasted with “free” or “wage” labor. The aim of this book is to restructure the discussion on the economic history of slavery by unpacking these conventional categories and examining their constituent elements. That which we call slavery was not the same economic species in all historical times and places, and even less did free labor represent a specific, well-defined alternative. Assessing the place of the peculiar institution in American economic development calls for a clear specification of how exactly slavery was peculiar. This is a tall order. The task is reduced somewhat by a primary focus on mainland North America and, ultimately, the United States. But the interpretation draws upon the rich literature that has emerged in recent decades on slavery, the slave trade, and the rise of the Atlantic economy during what we Americans call the colonial era, and this intellectual strategy entails certain risks. Slavery on the North American mainland had many distinctive features, the most obvious of which was demographic: the strong positive rate of natural increase of the slave population, which in turn generated an interest in accumulating wealth in the form of slaves, a motivation that permeated political as well as economic behavior. It is difficult to find counterparts to this behavioral configuration elsewhere in the Americas. But this and a host of other differences need not be fatal to comparative studies, if some of the underlying principles were the same, and this is the case that I put before my readers in the essays that follow. The core of the proposed restructuring is to distinguish three dimensions or aspects to slavery: (1) slavery as a form of labor relations, (2) slavery as a set of property rights, and (3) slavery as a political regime. Dimensions of Slavery Adam Smith argued that because a slave could not own property he “can have no other interest but to eat as much, and to labour as little as possible. Whatever work he does beyond what is sufficient to purchase his own maintenance, can be squeezed out of him by violence only . . .” Smith’s sharp condemnation of slavery became extremely influential, but as Seymour Drescher has noted, his assertion about the inefficiency of slave labor was commonplace in eighteenth-century Britain. Nor did Smith’s analysis of the institution rise to his normal scientific standard. He identified the slaveowner’s motive in perpetuating such brutality as “the pride of man” that “makes him love to domineer,” and slavery persisted only where crops were sufficiently profitable to “afford the expence of slave-cultivation.” Although elsewhere Smith was careful to analyze the interaction between individual motives and social outcomes, when it came to slavery he did not even ask how such self-indulgent enterprises could survive in a competitive world. In light of...