Slavery and American Economic Development

3. Property Rights, Productivity, and Slavery

3 Property Rights, Productivity, and Slavery A more prudent person might decide to leave the argument at just this point. The first chapter made the case that slavery as a form of work organization has been overemphasized relative to slavery as a set of property rights, and the second chapter argued that the broad contours of southern regional economic development are best understood as consequences of property rights in slaves. Why go further? If the physical productivity of slaves has received more attention than it deserves, why add to this misallocation by giving it even more in this chapter? My answer to these questions is that because the late antebellum productivity record has received so much attention and looms so large in prevailing thought about the economics of slavery, the task is not complete until we confront this microeconomic evidence one more time. The challenge is to show that the strong productivity performance of slave labor during this era is also best interpreted in terms of property rights. The basic intellectual strategy is this: If slavery were inherently superior as a form of work organization, these advantages should have been manifest quite generally, in many locations and economic activities. Instead, we find on close examination that slavery’s apparent production advantages only surfaced in particular times, places, and activities. Interpreting this geo-economic configuration in historical context is central for the property-rights thesis. The first step is to describe that context. 83 84 / Slavery and american Economic development The Rise of the Cotton South In the nineteenth century, slavery in the United States was closely if not symbiotically linked to the cotton economy. By 1850, nearly 80 percent of all slaves were engaged directly in agriculture, and nearly three-fourths of these worked on cotton-growing farms. But this formation was a late and in many ways surprising development in the last decade of the eighteenth century. It could not have been predicted at the time of the American Revolution, when cotton was of no commercial importance on the mainland . When a small volume of cotton exports began in the 1780s, the novelty of the source induced Liverpool customs officials to seize eight bags, on the grounds that so much cotton could not possibly have been produced in the United States. The diffusion of cotton growing became rapid in the 1790s; but even in 1794, cotton’s economic significance seemed so minor that negotiator John Jay was willing to sign away the country’s right to export cotton in American ships. How different would American history have been had this article been ratified (and enforced)?1 Textbooks traditionally ascribe this historical discontinuity to Eli Whitney’s invention of the cotton gin in 1793, a storybook formula hardy enough to have survived fresh debunking in every generation. Recent scholarship makes it clear that Whitney was far from the first to build a machine for separating cotton seeds from the fiber. Roller gins invented in the Bahamas were in use on all types of mainland cotton as early as 1791, and improved roller gins coexisted with Whitney’s and even extended their market for another thirty years before ultimately losing out. Whitney’s gin was a genuine innovation, replacing the pinch principle of the roller with a rotating, toothed cylinder, enhancing the speed of processing though at some cost in fiber quality. But even with this element of novelty, it was only after improvements provided by subsequent machinists that the variant known as the “saw gin” achieved general acceptance from planters. The transition stretched into the 1820s and entailed mutual adaptations among growers, gin makers, and the textile industry—much 1. The percentage of slaves in cotton is from J. D. B. DeBow, Compendium of the Seventh Census, 94; the Liverpool incident is reported in Stuart Bruchey, Cotton and the Growth of the American Economy, 45; for Jay’s Treaty, see Matthew B. Hammond, Cotton Industry, 21. property rights, productivity, and slavery / 85 more an illustration of interactive diffusion than an example of a great invention that reshaped history.2 Appreciating the protracted character of the transition to cotton as the dominant southern cash crop leads to the realization that the process was largely driven by demand. The technological breakthroughs of the Industrial Revolution led to rapid growth of British demand for raw cotton, especially after 1785. The market received an added boost when the slave revolution in St...