Slavery and American Economic Development

Epilogue: The Legacy of Slavery

Epilogue The Legacy of Slavery Judging a book by its title, some readers may have expected to find here an account of the contribution of slave labor to American economic growth, a topic that has received much attention from legal scholars and advocates in recent years. It is undeniable that enslaved African Americans supplied a substantial portion of the labor that built the American economy, and that they were not fairly compensated for their exertions. Despite its significance, this historical injustice is not the central concern of this book. These essays have dealt instead with the role of slavery as an institution—specifically as a set of property rights possessed by slaveowners and unavailable to landowners and employers of labor in the free states—in U.S. economic development in the nineteenth century. At an earlier historical phase, slave-based commerce played an integral role in the rise of the Atlantic economy, and thus indirectly fostered progress in the mainland colonies of North America as well. But by the end of the eighteenth century, a global shift of economic activity toward temperatezone regions was well under way, and the development of these parts of the United States was decisively shaped by their drive to attract free labor. Thus it was not slavery but the post-Revolutionary War abolitions and the exclusion of slavery from the Northwest Territory that launched the American economy on its modern trajectory. Contrary to depictions of the slave South as a prosperous economy devastated by war and abolition, these essays locate the roots of postbellum 123 124 / Slavery and american Economic development 1. The comparison with Brazil is from Richard Graham, “Slavery and Economic Development .” Alternative estimates of GDP per capita may be found in Leandro Prados de la Escosura, “International Comparisons of Real Product,” 24–32. Prados’s estimates, which use a proxy for Purchasing Power Parity procedures, differ considerably from the more standard figures developed by Angus Maddison. The differences, however, have virtually no bearing on the rank of the South in 1860. regional backwardness firmly in the antebellum era. That era was prosperous indeed for the slaveowners. But if we evaluate regional performance using a consistent measuring rod appropriate for a free society, such as the value of nonslave wealth per capita, we find levels in the South just over half those in the free states. And these ratios understate the regional gap, because they neglect investments in education (“human capital” in conventional economic terminology) that would be part of a more comprehensive definition of nonslave wealth. From this perspective, the postwar North-South disparity of roughly two-to-one in per capita income, a persistent feature of the U.S. economy between the Civil War and World War II, was basically consistent with prewar patterns. To be sure, by global standards the antebellum South was not one of the truly impoverished or backward economies of its day. By such indicators as railroad mileage, agricultural technology, banks, and even manufacturing , the South of 1860 was above the world average, and far ahead of Brazil, to name another large slave-based economic nation. But much has been made of the claim that the 1860 southern economy would have been the fourth richest in the world had it been an independent nation. In contrast , using more meaningful and less volatile wealth measures, the region would come in no better than fifteenth on a world scale, about the same as in postbellum years. Such international league tables are by no means precisely defined or measured, but they confirm that in broad economic terms the antebellum South is appropriately grouped with the middling countries of that era, such as Spain, Austria, Norway, or Portugal.1 In many respects, however, framing the issue as a calibration of the regional economy’s developmental level is not a satisfactory way to assess the economic legacy of slavery. For one thing, although these essays attribute southern underdevelopment to slavery uncompromisingly, the region’s postbellum economic history need not be seen as an inevitable consequence of the peculiar institution. Societies sometimes recover rapidly from wartime destruction, and sweeping institutional restructuring can be a positive benefit in economies otherwise well positioned for economic development. Germany and Japan after World War II are oftcited examples. More directly to the point, the post–Civil War South did in fact experience a significant economic invigoration on many fronts, including railroad investment, town-building, minerals...