Slavery in America

Slavery in America

http://www.huffingtonpost.com/2014/10/23/the-half-has-never-been-told_n_6036840....

This HuffPo article is about The half has never been told, a new history of American slavery by Edward Baptist. The article sums up Baptist's thesis in five bullet points, presented as if they might be controversial:

1) Slavery was a key driver of the formation of American wealth.
2) In its heyday, slavery was more efficient than free labor, contrary to the arguments made by some northerners at the time.
3) Slavery didn't just enrich the South, but also drove the industrial boom in the North.
4) Slavery wasn't showing any signs of slowing down economically by the time the Civil War came around.
5) The South seceded to guarantee the expansion of slavery.

I think all five are well supported by evidence.

BTW there is a brief mention of the fact that The Economist withdrew its published review of this book, with an apology for the reviewer's complaint:

Mr Baptist has not written an objective history of slavery. Almost all the blacks in his book are victims, almost all the whites villains. This is not history; it is advocacy.

In withdrawing the review, the magazine stated:

There has been widespread criticism of this, and rightly so. Slavery was an evil system, in which the great majority of victims were blacks, and the great majority of whites involved in slavery were willing participants and beneficiaries of that evil. We regret having published this and apologise for having done so.

The review is still accessible at this page. It is a wonder.

Edited to add: I've mentioned this controversy in the "EVIL" thread.

World Slavery.

Not for the faint of heart.

http://www.ted.com/talks/lisa_kristine_glimpses_of_modern_day_slavery?language=e...

https://www.freetheslaves.net/SSLPage.aspx

http://www.free2work.org/

Of his five points 1,3,and 5 are generally accepted by serious historians. I have spent the last ten minutes trying to find the title of the completely discredited book that argued point 2.

Point two was covered in Time on the Cross: The Economics of American Negro Slavery but it has been controversial. Adam Smith wrote that people work hardest when it is their own interest. If true you would have to assume that slavery, where all profit goes to the slave owner, is a bad system for motivating hard work. However, as the slave holders themselves pointed out, Northern wage-slaves were not much better off than the south's slaves. Very few in industry could truthfully say they were working for their own benefit, they worked to stave off starvation and disease, nothing more. Some slave owners did know how to motivate work. Read some of the slave biographies. Many were given a fair chance to earn money to purchase their freedom. Fo instance look at His promised land : the autobiography of John P. Parker

Point #5 is tricky. Slavery was fading out across the north. Virginia and Kentucky had fewer slaves than they did at the 1/4 century mark. They saw the presence of slaves as deterring immigration and they understood that immigrants were good for the economy. Prices for slaves were very high but that was due to several factors, opening new land, enforced restrictions on importing slaves, and high mortality rates during the 1832 and 1849 cholera epidemics.

I am not sure there is much new in the book.

> 5

I don't think no. 2 ("In its heyday, slavery was more efficient than free labor.…") was the thesis of Time on the Cross, or at least it wasn't first argued there. The logistics of southern American slavery were a favorite topic of "cliometricians" (i.e., economic historians using analytical models based on classical economic theory) from 1958 on. They argued that the slave system was an efficient, profitable labor system operating within a capitalist economy. I think this is essentially correct. What southern slavery lacked in ergonomic efficiency, it probably made up for through the commodification of slaves' bodies; they could be rented, exchanged, resold, or even converted into securities. Alabama, Mississippi, and Louisiana were the richest states in the Union, and that status depended entirely on the slave system.

TOTC pushed further, claiming that slaves had enjoyed a higher average standard of living than free workers, had stable nuclear families, were socialized to share their masters' "Victorian" morals and work ethic, and worked hard because they *wanted* to, not because they were coerced. The book overwhelmed most critics with timely rhetoric of "black achievement" under slavery, plus a huge amount of data analysis, at a time when computers were unavailable to the public and required far more advanced skills just to operate them. Robert Fogel, the lead author, also made audacious claims in the mass media that this data-driven book spelled the end of conventional history. TIME and Esquire agreed with him.

Once colleagues had a close look at the evidence in TOTC, they effectively tore the book to shreds. Some errors were historical, as when Eugene Genovese (who was busy finishing Roll, Jordan, Roll: The world the slaves made) had to point out to Fogel and Engerman that mules and castrated oxen do not replace themselves through reproduction. Herbert Gutman was so incensed by TOTC that he dropped what he was doing and attacked the book with his own monograph, Slavery and the Numbers Game. Fellow economists also piled on, mostly in journal articles. The claims about the alleged quality of slaves' diet and freedom to direct their own work were thoroughly refuted. A conference on the book's flaws, in which Fogel was good enough to participate, produced the book Reckoning with Slavery.

TOTC had been published along with a Supplement volume of "Evidence and Methods." In practice, though, the real companion volume to TOTC has been Reckoning with Slavery, which sums up how thoroughly TOTC has been discredited. The best that can be said for the book is that its reckless claims stimulated a reaction that included a lot of good historical work.

Back to #2, about the "efficiency" of slavery: So it's true that critics of slavery in the 1850s portrayed it as not only immoral but as inferior in every way to free labor. The southern dissident Hinton Helper argued, in essence, that slavery was holding back the South's progress, and this idea persisted unchallenged from Appomattox into the latter 20th century — not least because it served the purposes of white southern partisans. It collapses under scrutiny, however. Antebellum southern intellectuals had insisted that *their* form of slavery was rational, progressive, and pointed the way forward for the whole Anglo-Saxon race; this was the cornerstone of southern nationalism. A glance at the heyday of racism and imperialism in the U.S., after the Civil War (ca. 1877-1932), makes a strong case that southern ideology lost the war but won the peace. In the process, southerners revised their claims about slavery, insisting now that it had been a paternalistic institution devoted to the care and management of an inferior race. The "New South" was capitalist, sure, but the "Old South" had been a pre-modern, chivalric society. In economic terms, they claimed, slavery had probably cost the masters more than it earned them, compared to using free laborers. Ulrich B. Phillips really believed this and wrote impressively sourced histories in order to prove it; meanwhile, historian colleagues attacked the brief period of "Negro rule" during Reconstruction as a tragic mistake. This pastiche of Bourbon Democrat dogma was the white scholarly consensus until the 1950s and after. While Kenneth Stampp attacked claims of paternal benevolence with The Peculiar Institution, and the civil rights revolution pressured white scholars to start taking black American culture seriously, economic historians undermined the quantifiable claims about slavery — and now I've circled back to the beginning.

(Setting aside Point #5 for now.)

> 6

> "Alabama, Mississippi, and Louisiana were the richest states in the Union" (ca. 1850).

I was looking for a source for that statement, but got distracted. Certainly they were in the top five, and I believe I'm correct about their being the top three.

As for whether there is much new in The Half Has Never Been Told, it does seem that the book is a summary for non-experts of what experts know about the history of American slavery and how it has shaped the country's economy. That's a useful role for a book, provided only that it's well written.

As for continuing relevance, there are the findings of the Equality of Opportunity Project at Harvard University:

1. "Upward income mobility" varies greatly within the U.S., and is lowest in the former slave states.
2. This mobility (or lack of it) has not changed very much over time.

(An Alternet article, rich with schadenfreude, covered some of the findings last December. I think National Public Radio took more sober notice of the research this summer, but I don’t have a link. Anyway the project website provides both executive summaries and complete research papers.)

Muscogulus
Thanks as always for your comprehensive review. I will definitely re-read and give some thought to what you have written.

Most grateful for your review.

I come away with the sense that there is much re history, its theories, and its perspectives in academia that never makes it out to the public at large with the exception of someone like yourself taking the time to update us.

Many thanks.

>7 Muscogulus: The "richest" States in the Union

It has been said that a rough measure of wealth in the United States of 1850-60 was determined by 1. land ownership, and 2. the number of slaves a person owned

A check of the US Census of 1860 reveals that in both South Carolina and Mississippi, slaves outnumbered the white population.

In 1860 Mississippi counted 375,000 free whites, and 425,000 black slaves.
South Caroline counted 300,000 whites, and 420,000 slaves

Meanwhile the population of Georgia consisted of 580,000 white citizens, and 420,000 black slaves
Alabama consisted of 500,000 white citizens, and 420,000 black slaves.
Louisiana had 350,000 white citizens, and 300,000 black slaves

sparsely populated Florida ... only 70,000 whites but 68,000 black slaves.

wow!!!

i never realized.