Jonathan Catalan has a post up on American slavery. First, he suggests that slavery in the South would have eventually died out:I am certain that slavery in the United States would have been phased out naturally. Slavery was beneficial in the south because of low marginal productivity. The south was predominately an agricultural society, and it had not benefited from the mechanization it would benefit from in the decades directly after the American Civil War.
I have to agree with him on this. Slavery was dying out across the world, it would have been increasingly agitated against, it would have begun to get unprofitable (for the masters, that is - it was always unprofitable for the slaves). Many slave-owning Southerners felt it was a dying system and didn't even particularly like it - they simply didn't not like it enough to do much about it. Jonathan goes on:
"An important question to ask is whether or not the emancipation of the slaves during the civil war accelerated the post-war industrialization of the south. No longer benefiting from cheap labor, southern farmers had to radically increase production in order to remain profitable. This directly leads to another question: how long would it have taken to naturally rid the country of slavery?
There were important technological developments prior to the civil war: steel plows, seed drills, threshing machines, et cetera. The dramatic burst in agricultural productivity, however, occurred in the post-war (indeed, this increase in productivity directly after the war led to the industrial revolution of 1879-1906, since it allowed otherwise occupied labor to be restructured into more productive industries)."
I found all this very interesting, because I suppose I never really thought of the late twentieth century as a boom time for the South. Maybe you only learn this in Southern public schools, but I was always taught that the War retarded industrial development in the South, so the idea that the end of slavery encouraged industrialization seems unusual, albeit I suppose plausible, to me.
There are a couple of other developments that are worth considering here. First, the Jim Crow Laws were passed as the Reconstruction regimes began to subside during this same time period. In a lot of ways, blacks reverted back to a state of semi-enslavement. Sharecropping and credit extension from landlords cemented the reassertion of this semi-slavery, making labor cheaper and perhaps once again retarding the progress of industrialization.
By the early 1900s you had another force - the large-scale migration of blacks and others from the South to the North, known as the Great Migration. This would have increased the marginal productivity of labor and caused the South to substitute away from capital.
And finally, I hate to break it to my Austrian readers, but Southerners also often point to one source as the reason for the transition from being the "Cotton Belt" to the "Sun Belt": Franklin Delano Roosevelt. Between the New Deal, the military spending, and the military-industrial complex that continues to do a lot of work in the South, a lot of thanks goes to Southern Democrats and their allies in the White House.
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Between the New Deal, the military spending, and the military-industrial complex that continues to do a lot of work in the South, a lot of thanks goes to Southern Democrats and their allies in the White House.
ReplyDeleteOf course it did. What else can anyone expect to happen when you take money from across the country and spend it in one geographic region? No Austrian would deny this.. The South boomed because of FDR. We would also add that the rest of the corresponding country must be then comparatively poorer.
"Slavery was dying out across the world..."
ReplyDeleteUntrue. Slavery was only really coming into its own Cuba, for example, in the second half of the 19th century.
You would do well to consult Fogel & Engerman's "Time on the Cross" before making such bold statements as this.
"Many slave-owning Southerners felt it was a dying system and didn't even particularly like it - they simply didn't not like it enough to do much about it."
The histiographical work flies in the face of this claim; slavery was a popular cross-generational institution which was viewed as part of the "American dream" of social advancement in the South up to the end of the Civil War. There really was very little agitation if any against it past the 1820s.
"And finally, I hate to break it to my Austrian readers, but Southerners also often point to one source as the reason for the transition from being the "Cotton Belt" to the "Sun Belt": Franklin Delano Roosevelt."
ReplyDeleteThis is at best a mythologized, near hagiographic history of his reign. The Roosevelt administration did a great deal to screw up the lives of Southerners - take for example the Blue Ridge Parkway - which was built so as to benefit a certain class of motorists while stripping people of the land that their families had owned for generations. The TVA has been a shining example of government abuse. Indeed, most of the government sponsored development in the South was well outside the cotton belt regions - and the answer for why that was the case is rather easy - the piedmont regions of the South were easier for the government lay their hands - they wielded far less political power than the cotton belt did.
Of course that is not even getting into the rampant ecological damage committed by such projects as the TVA. What should be of great interest to a lot of people is the ongoing disaster which is happening on the rivers that the TVA operates on due to a collapse of a wet coal ash damn that has spread its pollutants into at least eight major rivers. It is rather amazing how little media coverage this has gotten ... then again, it isn't.
ReplyDeleteMore here: http://kentucky.sierraclub.org/newsroom/newsletter/pdf/news0209.pdf
One of my favorite songs about the T.V.A.: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=xKuKfvUygXE
"Untrue. Slavery was only really coming into its own Cuba, for example, in the second half of the 19th century."
ReplyDeleteXenophon - please be careful with your use of these absolutes and refutations. Noting that it is dying out across the world over the course of the 20th century is not to say that there aren't places where it isn't dying out.
When you say "Wrong [period]", "Untrue [period]" in such an obviously inappropriate way it stalls conversation... nobody is willing to respond to you except me, and that's only to walk you back to reality.
As for Fogel and Engerman, I have consulted them (in the past, at least - I didn't pull the book off the shelf for this particular post). I'm not disagreeing with their fundamental point that slave labor was an efficient system in the South - indeed, I said it was profitable. I'm simply agreeing with Jonathan that it would become less profitable as mechanization continued. Of course there is no guarantee of this - there has been some discussion about the success with industrial slave labor in the South. This isn't a question of whether slavey was or wasn't efficient - it almost certainly was. It's a question of the prevailing trends in the economy and how that would change the efficiency of slavery.
Fogel and Engerman aren't the end of the story anyway, Xenophon. My understanding is there are major questions about their data.
"The histiographical work flies in the face of this claim; slavery was a popular cross-generational institution which was viewed as part of the "American dream" of social advancement in the South up to the end of the Civil War."
It simply doesn't. There were a mix of views. Some did view slavery as an unambiguous good, but many viewed it as a moral problem but a necessary evil. If you want to call "moral problem but a necessary evil" the same thing as "popular" be my guest, but I think that's twisting the evidence.
*over the course of the 19th century
ReplyDelete"I'm simply agreeing with Jonathan that it would become less profitable as mechanization continued."
ReplyDeleteThis was a common enough claim before the 1970s, but there is no reason to take such a claim seriously now. There are more than enough examples of the use of technology (including the insights of chemical engineering in sugar production - one of the more technologically challenging fields of the 19th century) by planters in the South, Cuba, Brazil, etc. We no longer live in the shadow of U.B. Phillips. There really is no reason to think that slavery was dying out in the 19th century any more than the similar shifts in slave production geographically in the 18th and 17th centuries demonstrated such.
"Some did view slavery as an unambiguous good, but many viewed it as a moral problem but a necessary evil. If you want to call "moral problem but a necessary evil" the same thing as "popular" be my guest, but I think that's twisting the evidence."
You're just wrong. From the 1820s onward there is very little evidence that white Southeners who owned slaves had any moral problems with the institution. From that point forward, attitudes in favor of it only hardened over time. Only in the piedmont regions of the South was there dislike of the institution, but that was not due to some regard to the enslaved.
1. My argument is not and never was Phillips's, so I'm not sure why you're bringing him up - and as I've said I agree with many of Fogel and Engerman's critiques and findings (although they have their very well documented problems as well).
ReplyDelete2. Your history comes across as awfully retro - since Fogel and Engerman newer versions of the old Phillips argument have reemerged. Am I "living in the shadow of Phillips" or are you "living in the shadow of Fogel and Engerman". To a certain extent scholarship oscillates on these questions with the same pattern it does on any historical question. Why? Because both schools of thought have hit on something and you make your name for yourself in academia by restating an old, washed-up theory with shiny new numbers. Ultimately the whole process is probably progressive - Fogel and Engerman fix much of Phillips. Others fix much of Fogel and Engerman in the reaction, etc. But to call Jonathan and I "in the shadow of Phillips" because we raise doubts about decades old research that you cling to doesn't really hold water.
3. It's hard for me to argue with "you're just wrong". I would shift the date for the shift in positions somewhat later than 1820, though - isn't this traditionally considered to be more of an 1830s change in perspective. For the nth time you're doing this weird thing where you argue with the most extreme version of what I'm saying. Of course perspectives changed after the 1830s. Of course they didn't care enough to do anything about it (as I thought I said in the initial post). But the concern was there, the international pressure was building, and the pressure from non-slaveholding Southerners was inevitable. Don't pat yourself on the back if all you're going to trouble yourself to do is shoot down a straw-man version of what I'm saying.
4. The same goes for your point about slavery after mechanization. I brought up the whole issue of industrial slavery in my last comment, Xenophon! Clearly I'm not saying that it can't happen. For the n+1th time, my blogging time is not best spent by pointing out how 90% of your comments are based on straw-men and extreme versions of other people's arguments.
A suggestion on your commenting style, Xenophon (because we've had other readers who have noted it).
ReplyDeleteI often read blogs I disagree with but usually it's not so much that I think they're dead wrong as it is that I would have considerably shift the emphasis if I were to post on the same thing. You might try saying something like: "well, the relative marginal productivities of different classes of Southern workers is important for the efficiency of a slave system, but I think a more important factor might be X which would make slavery more persistent rather than less."
When you say "You're simply wrong" or "untrue" and leave it at that, you look:
1. Ignorant of the question at hand because it shows a complete inability to grapple with the major issues to deny the sort of basic microeconomics that Jonathan and I were discussing, and
2. Ignorant of the positions of the very people we're arguing with, because you bring up things (like slave labor elsewhere or the shift in the Southern position on slavery in the early nineteenth century) that (a.) we are aware of and don't deny, and (b.) even if we weren't aware of don't invalidate our argument - they would only really invalidate a simplistic, straw-man argument that neither Jonathan nor I made.
(1) If it looks like U.B. Phillips, it probably is U.B. Phillips.
ReplyDelete(2) The Fogel/Engerman thesis has yet to be overturned.
(3) 1820 is a an obvious date for obvious reasons (though really, the issue could be pushed back two decades - the Rev. War period of questioning of slavery as an institution ended in 1800).
"But the concern was there, the international pressure was building, and the pressure from non-slaveholding Southerners was inevitable."
What international concern is that exactly? Neither the British nor the French governments - the most important at the time - were concerned with slavery in the U.S. There was no pressure from non-slavholding Southerners either because they were (a) politically powerless (e.g., the piedmont regions of the South), or (b) they were invested in the slave-holding system either intergenerationally or due to the sorts of businesses they were involved in. The dominant, all-encompassing ideology of the South from the 1820s onward were that slaves and land development were the means by which to make it in the South.
"Don't pat yourself on the back if all you're going to trouble yourself to do is shoot down a straw-man version of what I'm saying."
You say straw-man, I say ill-informed notions regarding the Old South.
(4) "I brought up the whole issue of industrial slavery in my last comment, Xenophon!"
Yes, you brought it up, but not in any way I would agree with its application.
"When you say "You're simply wrong" or "untrue" and leave it at that..." (I stopped reading at this point.)
I of course didn't leave it at that ... I explained why you are wrong and you continue to be wrong. The problem is that you simply disagree with my position. That's fine, but the notion that I just "leave it at that" lurches into bizarro world.