Slavery and American Economic Development (review)

2007Book Reviews227 at odds in their competition for adherents; that identities differ across American regions; that the black-white racial dichotomy does not fit the historical facts ofthe American West; and that the West unsetdes conventional understandings about American history. Yet it would be unfair to say that there is nothing new in these pages. Perhaps what makes this book especially relevant is that these points must still be made for readers and for historians alike. University ofPennsylvaniaBrian Isaac Daniels Slavery andAmericanEconomicDevelopment. By Gavin Wright. (Baton Rouge: Louisiana State University Press, 2006. Pp. 152. Charts, tables, maps, notes, appendix, works cited, index. ISBN 0807131830. $25.00, cloth.) Every slave in the antebellum United States shared a common quality—he or she had the legal status ofmovable chattel, a piece ofpersonal property belonging to a particular owner. This quality, according to the distinguished economic historian Gavin Wright, is the key to die role ofslavery in American economic development. Originally delivered as the 1 997 Fleming Lectures at Louisiana State University, these three essays make a very convincing case mat property rights in slaves, rather than productivity resulting from work organization or physical efficiency, created an early advantage for soutfiern slaveholders in developing the best farmland and producing cash crops. To state the case in a way that perhaps oversimplifies but makes the point: Slaves, because diey were property, could be treated by their owners in ways that free labor would never have accepted from someone who hired them, especially not in a country as land-rich and labor-poor as the United States before 1 865. Wright highlights three features of property rights in slaves that benefited the masters. First, owners could move their labor to any part of the South, however distant or undesirable as a place to live, and put them to work immediately clearing land and establishing a plantation. This allowed larger slaveholders to gain control ofmuch of the region's best farmland. Second, owners could disregard any preferences on the part ofdieir slaves and assign all members ofslave families to any kind ofwork at any time during the year. This meant that they could constandy work at whatever was most likely to return a profit. Third, owners did not have to concern themselves with having too litde labor at peak planting and harvesting times; a captive labor force had to remain with the owner and do all the work he required. Wright's arguments on the key importance of property rights in slaves are persuasive for the South as a whole, and they are especially convincing for Texas. The Lone Star state had huge amounts of very cheap land but very litde free labor. It is difficult to imagine how large plantations, the most productive units in terms of cash crops, could have been established in Texas with free labor. How long would men have worked someone else's land for wages (let alone work it the way slaves had to work) when they could acquire their own for so litde? Small wonder that when good cotton land sold for less than ten dollars an acre, prime male field hands sold for more than a thousand dollars each. Wright focuses on how slavery contributed to the development of the South's agricultural economy, but he also describes an economic cold war between the 228Southwestern Historical QuarterlyOctober North and Soudi that followed the elimination (or the beginning of elimination) of slavery north of the Mason/Dixon Line and Ohio River during the era of the American Revolution. The North won this war, pulling ahead ofthe South, as Wright points out, in population, infrastructure, and technology. Wright indicates the ways in which slavery contributed to these failings in southern economic development, but, probably as a result ofthe time/space constraints ofthe lecture format, he pays little attention to other explanations. For example, he deals briefly with the role ofgeography as it affected certain aspects of the South's economy, but he does not consider how geography probably retarded the growth of industry. Steeply falling rivers in die New England states offered abundant waterpower for factories. Texas, where tfie rivers flow sluggishly to the Gulf, had no comparable source of...