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2. Property and Progress in Antebellum America
- Louisiana State University Press
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2 Property and Progress in Antebellum America For some years debates about the economic character of the antebellum South have fallen into a peculiarly constraining groove. “Was the slave South capitalist?” has been the question, taken to be the same as asking whether typical slaveholders were calculating, acquisitive, and in pursuit of material goals through markets. According to the terms of this discourse , the ascendancy of the view that American slaveowners were “rational capitalists” and slavery a “flexible, highly developed form of capitalism ” thereby implies that the course of the economy of the slave South was essentially similar to that of the capitalist North.1 But this is a non sequitur . Property owners in the two regions may have been more- or lessequally calculating, acquisitive, and in pursuit of material goals through markets—to the extent that we can ever hope to calibrate these sorts of subjective psychological traits for any society—but it would not follow that the two regional economies should closely resemble each other, because slavery and free labor were very different sets of institutional arrangements . That human relationships would be different under slavery is hardly surprising. That relationships between economic progress and the land were also very different is perhaps less obvious. Demonstrating that difference is the central purpose of this chapter. 1. Fogel, Without Consent or Contract, 64. An explicit statement on the similarity of the two capitalist regions is made by Edward Pessen, “How Different from Each Other?” See also Laurence Shore, Southern Capitalists. 48 I propose that we view the antebellum era as a kind of cold war on the North American continent, in which two different economic systems set out to generate wealth through territorial expansion. At the starting line in 1790, the two economies were nearly equal in population, area, and levels of wealth. Broadly speaking, they shared a similar cultural and legal heritage. So the economic competition boiled down to the institutional difference between them. We know who won the hot war that ended this historical era, but military prowess in itself is surely not an adequate or acceptable measure of the performance of an economy. Who won the antebellum economic cold war and how we should read the scoreboard of regional performance have long been in dispute. A central reason for this intellectual stalemate is that appropriate measures of economic success depended on property rights, and each region had reason to declare itself the victor on its own terms. Free Labor as an Institutional Innovation We begin with a defense of the premise that after about 1790 the establishment of free labor in the North and slavery in the South represented a true institutional difference between the regions. Ever since the publication of David Brion Davis’s Problem of Slavery in Western Culture in 1966, it has been understood that moral opposition to slavery emerged as an important historical force only in the second half of the eighteenth century, in North America as in Britain. Prior to the American Revolution, slavery was legally enforced and socially accepted in all of the British American colonies, North as well as South. But when prevailing opinion shifted, as it did in the northern states, the change was decisive and fundamentally irreversible. The Revolution itself was an important ideological crystallization . As early as 1777, the new Vermont state constitution provided that “no male person, born in this country, or brought from over sea, ought to be holden by law, to serve any person, as a servant, slave or apprentice, after he arrives to the age of twenty-one years, nor a female, in like manner , after she arrives to the age of eighteen years, unless they are bound by their own consent, after they arrive at such age, or bound by law, for the payment of debts, damages, fines, costs, or the like . . .” Pennsylvania’s gradual emancipation law followed in March 1780. All of the New England property and progress in antebellum america / 49 [35.175.212.5] Project MUSE (2024-03-29 02:21 GMT) 50 / Slavery and american Economic development states had abolished slavery within a year of the war’s end. The last northern holdouts, New York and New Jersey—the two with the highest shares of slaves in their populations, at 7.6 percent in 1790—fell into line in 1799 and 1804, respectively.2 The North-South divide in the response to this new thinking was unmistakable . The first draft of the Northwest Ordinance, written in 1784, would...