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... the average value of their landholdings grew from $ 12, 000 to $ 27, 000 and the average size of their slaveholdings from thirty-eight to fifty-eight slaves. (Federal Census Returns) In the North the top 1 percent of the wealth holders were mainly urban merchants and manufacturers whose businesses were based on wage labor, while in the South the top 1 percent. The big planters of the cotton belt were generally consolidating their economic positions during the late antebellum era. Between 1850 and 1860, the real wealth of the typical gang-system planter increased by 70 percent. Rather than gradually slipping from its economic dominance, this class was overthrown by the Civil War, which led to the destruction or loss of two-thirds of its wealth. By 1870 Southerners no longer predominated among the nations super rich; four out of every five of the super rich were now Northerners.
So it was not the vagaries of the market or other economic events but military defeat that moved the scepter of wealth from the agrarian South to the industrializing North. (Conrad, Meyer) Frederick Law Olmsted, the great landscape architect and a critic of the economy and culture of the South, posed the problem of measuring the technical efficiency of slavery in a fairly clear way when he said that a comparison of the relative efficiency of slave and free labor should be made man with man, with reference simply to the equality of muscular power and endurance. (Mitchell) To perform such a comparison it is necessary to take account of differences in the age and gender composition of the slave and free labor forces. About two-thirds of all slaves were in the labor force, which was about twice the proportion among free persons. Such a high proportion could be achieved only by pressing virtually everyone capable of any useful work at all into the labor force. As a consequence, nearly one-third of the slave laborers were untrained children and about an eighth were elderly, crippled, or disadvantaged in some way. Women represented a much larger proportion of field laborers among slaves than among free farmers.
When indexes of labor productivity (average output per equivalent prime hand) are used to compare technical efficiency, they give a marked advantage to slave plantations. By this measure the intermediate and large slave plantations of the cotton belt were nearly twice as efficient as the free farms of the same region in 1860. But indexes of labor productivity exaggerate the relative advantage of slave farms because they do not take account of the fact that the slaves usually worked on more fertile soils and had more work animals and other capital than did the free farmers of the region. The index of total factor productivity overcomes this problem because it takes account not only of the average amount of labor required to produce a given amount of output, but also of the quantity and quality of the land and capital that were employed. Taking account of the superior land and capital with which slaves worked considerably reduces their edge over free farmers. The advantage of small plantations (1 - 15 slaves) over free farms that was indicated by the index of labor productivity is now almost completely wiped out, and the advantage of the two classes of gang-system farms (those with 16 or more slaves) is cut in half.
Nevertheless, plantations with 16 or more slaves exhibit a considerable advantage over smaller farms, whether slave or free. (Reidy) The gang-system plantations produced, on average, about 39 percent more output from a given amount of input than either free farms or slave farms that were too small to employ the gang system. (Fogel, Engerman) A plantation with 16 slaves usually had about lo slaves old enough to work in a gang, and 10 hands appear to have been the threshold number for the successful operation of a gang. As Smith put it, the continued repression of the rights of free blacks in the North gave the greatest efficiency to the main argument for justifying slavery. Consequently, the struggle for the civil rights of northern blacks had to be an integral part of the antislavery movement. (Davis) Slavery was profitable, efficient, and economically viable in both the United States and the West Indies when it was destroyed, but it was never morally good. As Professor Mc Cay of South Carolina wrote on the eve of the Civil War: Never before has the planting been more profitable than in the last few years... the planters have been everywhere rich, prosperous and happy. (Mc Cay) Slavery did not die because either divine Providence or events ensure that evil systems cannot work. Its death was an act of economie, a political execution of an immoral system at its peak of economic success, incited by men ablaze with moral fervor.
Slavery deserved to die despite its profitability and efficiency because it served an immoral end. Efficiency is not a synonym for good and it is a disservice to the struggle for a moral society to make it a synonym. Slavery was intrinsically evil because its productive efficiency arose directly out of the oppression of its laborers. The efficiency of slavery seemed paradoxical not because an intrinsically good or a morally neutral technology was made to serve an evil purpose, but because an intrinsically evil technology was so productive. Discarding the assumption that productivity is necessarily virtuous resolves the paradox. From the mid- 1840 s on, however, the slave economy of the South was vigorous and growing rapidly.
Whatever the pessimism of masters during the economic crises of 1826 - 1831 and 1840 - 1845, during the last half of the 1840 s and most of the 1850 s they foresaw a continuation of their prosperity and, save for the political threat from the North, numerous opportunities for its expansion. (Reidy) The main thrust of cliometric research has demonstrated that this economic optimism was well-founded; it has also undermined the competing thesis that slavery was gradually expiring of its own internal economic contradictions. By early 1861 maintenance of peace required not merely northern acquiescence to the status quo of 1850, but acquiescence to the existence of an independent confederacy dedicated to the promotion of slavery. It follows that assessment of the dilemma posed by Stamps requires more than weighing the sin of slavery against the sin of war. (Hammond) It requires also a consideration of the likely chain of events that would have unfolded if the South had been unshackled from northern restraint and allowed to become a worldwide champion of slavery and of aristocratic republicanism. Once we understand that the essence of the profitability of slavery was the financial value of slave property, certain things fall into place. One implication is that profitability was enjoyed by every slaveholder, large and small, in every part of the South. The reasons for the high prices have to do with trends in cotton, but the capital gains extended to owners who had nothing to do with cotton -- because, unlike land and unlike free labor, slaves were moveable and saleable and their value was determined in an efficient region-wide market independently of local crops, local productivity, and local development.
To some historians it may seem self-evident that profitability studies that emphasize regional distinctions and variations are more sophisticated than an aggregate analysis, but in this case the most fundamental elements of the profitability are aggregate in their very nature. (Parker) Whereas in the free labor economy of the North, westward expansion threatened to hurt eastern business by driving up the wages of labor, in the South planters were in a position to capture the benefits of more expensive labor, in the form of higher slave prices. Thus, the North was economically of two minds about territorial expansion, but the South had an interest in expansion that unified east and west. The Confederacy could have financed its expansionist, proslavery policies by exploiting the southern monopoly of cotton production. A 5 cent sales tax on cotton not only would have put most of the burden of such policies on foreign consumers, but would have yielded about $ 100 million annually during the 1860 s- 50 percent more than the entire federal budget on the eve of the Civil War. (Starobin) With such revenue the Confederacy could have emerged as one of the worlds strongest military powers, maintaining a standing army several times as large as the Norths, rapidly developing a major navy, and conducting an aggressive foreign policy, which strengthens the idea that slavery was a viable economic system of the South.
Such revenues would also have permitted it to covertly or overtly finance aristocratic forces in Europe who were vying with democratic ones for power across the Continent. Like northern free labor, southern slavery provided the institutional foundation for a society divided along class lines. The recognition in law of human property conferred both privilege and power upon the masters that no northern employer even came close to approximating. Moreover, title in slave property also endowed masters with ownership over the natural increase of their chattels and everything that the slaves labor produced. The value of slave property was a great unifying factor for the South, and an economic interest, largely separate from the interest in the success of southern agriculture, developed around these values. Bibliography: Conrad, Alfred H.
and Meyer, John R. The Economics of Slavery in the Antebellum South, Journal of Political Economy 66, 1958. Davis, Charles S. The Cotton Kingdom in Alabama. Montgomery: Alabama State Department of Archives and History, 1939.
Federal Census Returns. Population and Slave Schedules, Houston Co. , Ga. , 1850. Fogel, Robert W. , Stanley L. Engerman.
The Economics of Slavery, in The Reinterpretation of American Economic History. New York: Harper & Row, 1971. Foust, James D. The Yeoman Farmer and Westward Expansion of U. S. Cotton Production.
Arno Press, 1976. Genovese, Eugene. The Political Economy of Slavery. New York: Pantheon, 1965. Gallman, Robert E. Self-Sufficiency in the Cotton Economy of the Antebellum South, Agricultural History 44, 1970.
Hammond, Matthew B. The Cotton Industry. New York: MacMillan, 1897. Mc Cay, C.
F. Cultivation of Cotton. In Wright, Gavin. The Political Economy of the Cotton South: Households, Markets, and Wealth in the Nineteenth Century.
Norton, 1978. Mitchell, B. W. Olmsted, F. L. A Critic of the Old South.
Johns Hopkins Press, 1924. Parker, William N. Slavery and Southern Economic Development, Agricultural History 44, 1970. Reidy, J.
P. From Slavery to Agrarian Capitalism in the Cotton Plantation South: Central Georgia, 1800 - 1880. University of North Carolina Press, 1992. Starobin, Robert S. Industrial Slavery in the Old South.
New York: Oxford University Press, 1970. Wright, Gavin. The Political Economy of the Cotton South: Households, Markets, and Wealth in the Nineteenth Century. Norton, 1978.
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Research essay sample on Westward Expansion Labor Productivity
