Slavery and Hard Times: Morality and Utility in American Antislavery Reform

SLAVERY AND HARD TIMES: MORALITY AND UTILITY IN AMERICAN ANTISLAVERY REFORM Louis S. Gerteis During the 1840s, the focus of antislavery reform shifted from evangelical moral reform to a liberal antislavery appeal which pressed for emancipation as part of a broad utilitarian assault on the evils of pauperism, vice, and ignorance in industrializing America. As the enemies of slavery subsumed moral sentiments within an analysis of the relationship between slavery and the nation's economic development, they identified slavery as a cause of poverty and recurring "hard times" in the North. In the new liberal antislavery appeal, true philanthropy required not merely sympathy for suffering humanity but an American state active in insulating the productive energies of society—which alone generated prosperity, virtue, and intelligence—from the oppressive influence of "class" interests, epitomized by the Slave Power. The works of two of the North's leading political economists—the elder Theodore Sedgwick (d. 1839), a laissez-faire Democrat, and Henry C. Carey, a protectionist Whig—illustrate the relationship between slavery and hard times which antislavery reformers found increasingly persuasive. In their distinctive fashions, Sedgwick and Carey reflected the tendency ofnorthern political economists to project a harmony of interests between capital and labor. In doing so, they criticized the most disruptive aspects of industrialization, particularly the creation ofa dependent wage-earning class, at the same time that they countered the arguments of radical labor reformers who equated chattel slavery with wage slavery .1 Here, their interest in economic development merged with the social concerns of antebellum moral reform; here the utilitarian assault on the Slave Power began. Sedgwick wrote to instruct workingmen on the importance of acquiring property and defending the sanctity ofprivate ownership. His analy1 Jonathan A. Glickstein, " 'Poverty Is Not Slavery': American Abolitionists and the Competitive Labor Market," in Lewis Perry and Michael Fellman, eds., Antislavery Reconsidered : New Perspectives on the Abolitionists (Baton Rouge: Louisiana State Univ. Press, 1979), 195-218. The interrelationship oflabor reform, celebrations of progress, and abolitionism is the subject of Marcus Cunliffe, Chattel Slavery and Wage Skvery: The Anglo-American Context, 1830-1860 (Athens: Univ. of Georgia Press, 1979). SLAVERY AND HARD TIMES317 sis of the relationship between historical progress and the advancement of liberty—between prosperity and equality of opportunity—led directly to an assault on southern slavery. Sedgwick defined the condition of slavery as the inability to acquire property, particularly land. Conversely, property widely and equitably distributed, produced "liberty and happiness." Wherever the vast majority of those who "labour with their hands" were without property in the form of land or other "reasonable possessions," workingmen have "either been slaves, or nearly as wretched as slaves." Thus, the "first dawn of liberty" arose as the "slave peasants" of Europe acquired property and purchased their freedom. Liberty advanced not by the "influence ofreligion and philanthropy alone," but by the fact that liberty rendered the peasants' labor more productive and more "profitable ... to their former masters."2 Although Sedgwick did not join with abolitionists to agitate the slavery issue as a moral question, he concluded his primer on political economy with a thorough denunciation of slavery as a barrier to progress and a threat to republican government. Resting on class legislation of the most blatant sort, slavery violated laissez-faire principles and threatened to destroy America's republican institutions. "This just democratic government will put an end to slavery," concluded Sedgwick, "or slavery will put an end to it." It was "impossible" for a system of forced labor to exist harmoniously with the free, prosperous, and progressive economy of the North. Sedgwick did not intend to embrace the black man as an equal, but the fact (as he put it) that the"white man stands at thehead" of the various families of man while the black man, by a "long course of degradation" had been rendered inferior did not alter the underlying truth that slavery "is the natural enemy of every man who performs labor , of every workingman in the United States." The solution, wrote Sedgwick, was "gradual emancipation and the gradual removal of the coloured people."3 Sedgwick regarded poverty and slavery as related problems. His sanguine view of the steady improvement in the conditions...