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Why Slaveholding interests did indeed cause the the Civil War
When America was founded, slavery was on the way out: turns out it wasn’t that profitable of a system for tobacco farming, and sugar couldn’t be grown in the continental US. Many northern states abolished slavery and then the south followed suit. If there was a time for the peaceful national abolition of slavery it was then. Most Southerners even saw slavery as a regrettable institution that would be phased out (Jefferson most famously).
Then Eli Whitney invented the Cotton Gin, and suddenly mass cotton agriculture became a profitable option for slave agriculture. With the old southwest open for settlement in the first decades of the 19th century, those territories filled with cotton slave plantations. Because of soil exhaustion, the states of the old south (Virginia, the Carolinas, Maryland) were not as suitable for cultivation of cotton, and so profited mainly from the selling of their excess slave population to plantations in Tennessee, Alabama, Arkansas, Louisiana, Missippi and Florida (later Missouri and Texas). In order for this to continue to be profitable, the territory under the yoke of slavery had to continually expand, which perhaps explains the growth of rabid pro-slavery ideology of politicians from these states in this era who started to justify slavery as a moral good).
Now of course this was not a sustainable system because a). there is only so much land that is suitable for cotton farming and b). plantations directly competed with free settlers for land (which explains some of the rivalry between the north and the south better than fringe abolitionism). This also doesn’t fit with the argument that if we had merely waited slavery would have fixed itself more peacefully. A large portion of the southern political class was heavily invested in the continued expansion of slavery (so they could make money selling slaves). This was one cause of the Mexican-American war (to acquire more land for growing cotton), and also resulted in schemes like that of the Knights of the Golden Circle’s plan to capture Central America and the Caribbean to make more slave states, and William Walker’s Filibuster War in Nicaragua. The compromise of 1820, the compromise of 1850, and the Kansas-Nebraska Act all continued to give more power to slaveholding interests. You wouldn’t have needed to be an abolitionist to be resentful towards what seemed like the disproportionate power and influence of slaveholding interests in the elections leading up to the Civil War.
Then there’s the actual election of 1860. First of all, I want to note that Lincoln was not elected on a platform of sudden abolition, nor did he actually move to abolish slavery during the Civil War until 1863. All Lincoln promised to do was to prevent the expansion of the institution into new territories (few of which were suitable for plantation agriculture anyway).
Secondly, slave holding interests arguably lost that election because of running John Breckenridge as a third party candidate instead of backing Stephen Douglas. Southern Democrats refused to endorse Douglas at the party convention in Charleston because Douglas was not willing to endorse the maximalist position of allowing slaveholders to bring their slaves into any new territory (potentially against the wishes of the population). This was just a bridge too far for Northern voters after the Kansas Nebraska act opened territory that was supposed to be closed to slavery by the compromise of 1820 to slaveholders, and the Fugitive Slave Act forced Northern States to enforce the institution within their own borders where the population was opposed to it.
Both Douglas’s and Lincoln’s positions seem like reasonable ways of gradually phasing out slavery to me (especially Douglas, who didn’t tend to touch the right for new states to choose to allow slavery AT ALL). Instead the South chose secession and war. It also seems to me that the political impasse that led to the war was less caused by abolitionism, but rather the political extremism of the Southern Planters class.
I’d urge those who disagree to put yourself in the shoes of a northern farmer in the late 1850s/1860s. Wouldn’t you have been frustrated by the stranglehold that slaveholding interests seemed to have on the national government, preventing the opening of new lands in the West for settlement by your sons? Encouraging economic policies that were good for cotton plantations but not for your wheat crop? A vote for Lincoln was less of a vote for abolitionism, and more of a “fuck you” to the insidious and outsized influence of slaveholders on federal economic policies.
I've always heard that as the conventional wisdom, but I wonder if it's really true? If you put aside all morality and politics, it seems odd that they couldn't find some profitable use for literally free labor. Especially in the rural south, where a natural resistance to both the sun and malaria would have been huge. Maybe tobacco farming would have gone out, but they could have grown something else, with black slaves working on peanut farms or whatever. And of course house slaves would have been useful anywhere.
More empirically: Jefferson famously tried to free his slaves on his death, but he couldn't afford it. The cost was too high. If slavery was really "on its way out" it seems odd that the price of slaves was still so high.
It seems more like this is a "just so story" that we tell to simplify things. But it didn't have to be. Slavery was always a choice. They did it because it was profitable, but only for a select few, and they were mostly growing things like tobacco and sugar that did nothing of any economic use. But there was also no particular reason it had to end, except that people started to feel bad about it. It had endured for hundreds of years, and could have gone right on into the present day if people hadn't developed a conscounce about it.
This is the first time I've ever heard about that "Knights of the Golden Circle" thing. Kind of a big hole in the American education system I guess. But I can see why they leave it out... it brings up too many awkward questions. Why didn't the US take over the caribbean? It would have made sense. Both for money/realpolitik (those caribbean islands were producing crazy amounts of cash, much more then the US did for a long time) and arguably would have been better off ruled by the US instead of distant European monarchies or "Ok you're free now" suddenly putting slaves in charge of everything, like Haiti. But instead we just took Puerto Rico and nothing else because... that's just the way it is, I guess.
It’s not actually free though. If you factor in the costs of feeding, housing and clothing it’s probably comparable to the median wage of the era. True, you aren’t paying the slave, but you are providing all his material needs and possibly health care as well (granted health care in that era was pretty basic). And this doesn’t account for the business costs of having a manager making sure your slaves work, security so they can’t leave.
Sometimes slaves were actually paid. I've seen some account books and journals from one particular mediumish farm in the 1850s-60s (to the best of my recollection, the total population was the owner and his wife and about 5 children, plus maybe 4-5 hired workers and 20-25 slaves, who were about 20% men, 20% women, and 60% children). Speaking only for that one location, and purely from an accounting perspective, there wasn't much difference between hired workers and enslaved workers, except that the enslaved workers were usually paid less per capita. Most of the pay wasn't in money, it was in produce, which could be consumed by the workers and their families (this was how they got their food for the year), or be taken to market and sold for cash or bartered for other things. Bacon was a big deal. It's been a while, but as I recall, the hired workers were only paid on merit (agreed upon wages, but the better ones were paid more, and there was some arrangement about produce vs. cash), but payment to the enslaved workers was based on both merit and family size. (That is, when a slave had a baby, that family got more pay, which is to say, more food.) The owner's family also worked, but weren't paid directly, of course.
All workers lived on the farm, but I have to assume that the hired workers had better quarters, and the family had a nice house. In other respects, like health care, the slaves seem to have been treated as kind of a disreputable offshoot of the family, like an adult child with Down Syndrome, who had to be looked after and kept out of trouble and put to as much productive work as possible. But one or two of the enslaved workers were actually trusted as much as the more reliable hired workers, to be able to independently take goods to market, sell them for a fair price, and return with the proceeds.
I don't recall seeing any incidents of leaving, during the period I looked at, but I'd assume that local law enforcement would be harsh, not to mention that most people in the area would at least recognize them. They left the farm every Sunday to go to the "colored people's church", after all. And I seem to recall something about one of the young (black, enslaved) men courting a (black, enslaved) girl from another farm, which implies that they had some sort of a social web.
That's just one particular time and place, of course, and I suspect it was much better conditions than average.
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My source for this is "What God Hath Wrought", the 1815-1848 volume of the Oxford History of the US. My understanding of the argument is that Southern soils in the Eastern part of the country had begun to be exhausted by the early ~1820s due to poor farming practices. This made it difficult to grow Tobacco or Cotton profitably because the land just didn't have enough nutrients in it any more for those crops. Other crops like wheat or peanuts that were less intensive or even restorative, were better harvested using animal or partially mechanized labor. There's a reason the north didn't have slaves on its wheat farms, although I can't pretend to know exactly why.
In terms of the Knights of the Golden circle, I think it's left out of history books because of the general discomfort that Americans have historically had with imperialism. This was a country founded explicitly on anti-imperialist principles of popular sovereignty and democracy. Plans to conquer Central America and the Carribean generally don't align with that image. Of course, in practice, the US has and continues to be an imperialist power, so I do wonder, like you, if this exclusion from our education system of these uncomfortable facts is actually a good thing.
Even the Romans abandoned slave worked wheat plantations eventually. Different crops are cultivated most efficiently in different ways and it's pretty plausible that wheat- or possibly temperate-climate crops more broadly- don't do well with the kind of agricultural system that meshes well with slave labor.
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Initially, African-descended people had less comparative advantage in the North because their malaria-resistance conferred little or no advantage in a colder climate. Additionally, several crops that slave populations purchased from west Africa had prior special experience with (e.g. rice, indigo) were not widely viable outside of particular regions along the southern Atlantic (NC, SC, GA) and gulf (LA, MS) coasts. There are other reasons as well, but these are two particularly-interesting ones.
Well, beneath the rhetoric was a pretty solid foundation of impatience with British refusal to let colonists swarm past the Appalachians and conquer more Indian land, so YMMV.
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I think the real reason the Knights of the Golden Circle aren’t discussed more is that they’re historically irrelevant. The 1840s–50s featured severe conflicts in Kansas, Nebraska, and Missouri, while John Brown and his small group made waves in the southeast. Then Lincoln was elected, Fort Sumter was fired on, and the next five years were filled with more important battles than even most armchair histories can keep straight. Finally, you have Sherman’s march, Lee’s surrender, Lincoln’s assassination, Reconstruction, and the rise of the KKK. With all of that, who cares that some southerners and southern-sympathizers had dreams of eventually taking over the Caribbean? Or that an even smaller number wanted to create a northern confederacy centered around the Great Lakes? Both are pretty much just trivia.
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According to John Boles, a professor of history at Rice University:
Saying the costs are too high is technically correct but Jefferson's situation in particular has some details to consider that may make one consider what exactly that statement means. The laws around debt and Jefferson wanting to give his slaves a chance at life if he did free them by basically gifting them huge financial gifts made it economically unviable for him.
Is slavery profitable? Yes. Is it more profitable than willing workers engaging in a free market? That is the question. Opportunity cost is a thing.
Thanks for linking the anecdote, I hadn't heard that before.
Presumably that debt was being serviced by the income of the land and slaves, no? In modern terms, it's possible to own a business (with income) that also has a debt. If you inherit that business, you also inherit the debt. It doesn't mean the business was worth nothing, even if you don't have the cash to pay off the debt instantly.
I agree that Jefferson's situation was wierd and maybe a bad example for the economics of slavery, since it seems like he was more concerned with other things like art, politics, etc and didn't really care about money. On the other hand... maybe that's the point? The guy was so rich, and from such easy money, that he never had to care about money at all. He could afford to throw away money on things like turning Monticello into his own personal architectural vanity project, while also being president, and it just didn't matter. Slavery was profitable.
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Do you have a source for that? Jefferson talked a lot about freeing his slaves during his lifetime, but he didn't because he couldn't have afforded to run his estate without slave labor, and he wasn't willing to downgrade his lifestyle. He freed a handful in his will, but not most of them. Freeing your slaves upon your death was fairly straightforward, and the only "cost" would have been the fact that your heirs would have to figure out how to keep their estate running without slaves.
George Washington did free his slaves in his will, but he complicated it by stating they would be free upon the death of his wife. Martha Washington, surrounded by slaves who made it rather obvious that they were waiting for her to pass away peacefully in her sleep (or, you know, fall down some stairs or something...) freed them in her lifetime.
Jefferson is admittedly a complicated case. The man spoke grandly about human liberty, but also spent money like water and needed slaves to pay his bills. I can't say for sure that he wanted to free all of them. He freed a few, while the others were sold to pay his debts. You can't say it's "straightforward" when we're talking about human slavery here, plus a very large amount of money for the time.
Regardless I think it goes to my original point- slavery was not on its way out economicacally, since those slaves were worth such a large amount of money. If you really want I'll link some books on "yes slaves were worth a large amount of money."
No, I agree that slavery was profitable, and the arguments that it was "economically nonviable" and would have ended even without the Civil War is basically historical cope. I was simply questioning why it would have been "costly" to free slaves, other than the obvious cost of no longer having free labor. "I can't afford to free my slaves" is a rather straightforward equation: if slavery is bad, it's still bad even if it costs you money to end it.
Well it's always opportunity cost. "I can't afford to give away my house for nothing." Why not? It costs nothing, right? "Because it has a huge mortgage attached, and also it would be insane to give away something worth that much for nothing." "Oh, so you could give it away, you just don't want to?" "yes."
I think the finances of plantation slavery were also a bit weird to modern eyes. when cash was low they borrowed money, since selling slaves was tough. When cash was high they bought more slaves, since it paid better than paying off debt. I don't pretend to understand the business decisions of the time. Anyway I think we agree- this was a business decision, they weren't just giving up on something worth nothing.
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Slavery, in general, is mostly useful for low-skill labor-intensive industries. The amount of rote, menial labor needed or wanted in society has been on a downward trend for centuries.
Slavery could have held on a little longer, but there’s a reason that even in the Islamic world where slavery is regarded with a wink and a nod you have to go pretty deep third world to find lots of slaves doing things that aren’t sex work. One bulldozer with a trained operator is more efficient than literal dozens of slaves with shovels.
Weird how sweatshops, prison labor, and human trafficking are still things then.
Imprisonment in the US costs 10s of thousands of dollars per prisoner per year ($133k/year in California). Making them stamp license plates cannot be enough to make economic sense. I'm pretty sure it is a large net loss. But then it would be a bit larger of a net loss without the forced labor.
As I understand it, a lot of prison labor is in agriculture and food production.
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Yeah but... that's with all sorts of legal and ethical rules.
Ask yourself. If there were no rules. You could own a slave. Human chattel. Do whatever you want. Do you really not think you could make money from that?
Yes, the default niche for non-third world slavery in the 21st century, like actual slavery, is sex work. There's a few other niches where it hangs on, but they're niches. There's a few unfree domestic servants and a small number of unfree people working in sweatshops, but by and large the hondurans making sub-minimum wage in a meatpacking plant in a company town in deep rural areas chose to be there and could easily leave and get another shitty job if they want, and most of the indonesian children making sneakers are there because their parents want them their and not because their bosses force them to be. Yes these people face unfair labor practices, but it's not slavery- they choose to put up with it. Even the Bangladeshis in Qatar building world cup stadiums aren't really slaves; they're paid labor which gets a shitty deal by first world standards.
Prison labor is probably the largest category of unfree labor in the modern, even semideveloped world, and it doesn't make any economic sense, it just gives prisoners something to do other than fight each other and try to smuggle in drugs, and lets the rest of us feel better about making them be productive. Most heavy labor slavery is deep third world because machines just make more sense for the kinds of tasks that slaves can do.
I thought there was still some agricultural slavery for labor-intensive crops in areas with very low HDI. Cocoa a fairly major example, I believe. I do agree that for most factory jobs that 'slavery' is an exaggeration, and people just don't understand how shit subsistence agriculture is as an existence to compete against making phones and sneakers
Yes, in deep third world countries there’s slavery in agriculture and mining. Cocoa in west Africa, for example, uses slaves(disproportionately children). The Congo has slaves in its mines. But the kind of labor slavery which needs huge slave strata is, well, a feature of very low HDI deep third world countries. Notably Central America, an impoverished region which produces very similar cash crops to west Africa and likewise features high corruption levels and limited government control, doesn’t have much agricultural slavery.
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This sounds a lot like like having a powerful well cultivated and devoted ally, but instead he sucks at things, and resents you, and will probably betray you if he sees the chance.
Listen... do you want to own a slave? There are a lot of subs out there that would be willing. Just find one that's ok with being cultivated and fin-dommed.
Yes. there are "still rules" but you'll find that you can get them agree to ignore the bad rules, and that the good rules are good for your relationship and their cultivation anyway.
If you find that there is a job you want them to do that they don't want to do- this is a strong sign that you are using an inefficient tool for the job anyway. Their cognitive misalignment with your will is a legitimate efficiency loss.
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Probably not as much as you think. Remember that this slave is going to need basically constant supervision and will never work harder than the bare minimum. What are you going to do, fire him?
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Yes, you could, but the question is "how much?" You need to spend your money on satisfying the basic physiological needs of your slave, on preventing them from escaping, on forcing them to work.
And this work has to somehow be both simple, so your slave can't screw it up and force you to spend even more of your money, and lucrative, so the whole operation makes sense economically.
And the whole operation has to scale.
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Human trafficking is mostly aiming at sexual slavery, prison labor is horrendously economically inefficient and mostly exists because you have to do something with them rather than for the output, and sweatshops are mostly employing free people who can quit their job and go get a different, equally shitty one.
Oh ok cool. Thanks for clearing that up. I mean, you didn't really make any logical argument or cite any sources but you're here on the internet so I'm sure you're a trusted authority figure. I trust you. All those southerners selling slaves at high prices were just idiots I guess. There's just no use for a free labor source, might as well just kill them all.
On another note, do you have any advice on where I can hire a good gardener? I've been paying a Mexican guy, but I feel weird paying a guy who's obviously here illegally. I'd like to hire an American, but the going rate is way too high and there's just no way I can afford that.
You have not given any sources at all either.
And which part of their argument was illogical?
And "slavery is our competed by not enslaved people for legitimate labour" does not mean that slaves are worthless. For start, some people are into torture and rape.
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You can disagree politely, or you can be a snide, sarcastic jerk. You chose the latter. Don't do that.
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They didn't take it over because life isn't a Machiavellian cynical power struggle. You often do need a casus belli to get your population to do terrible things to another population. Shit, it is a good thing we didn't try to take Haiti, those people suffered under one of the harshest slave regimes the world has ever seen. I normally think generational trauma is bullshit, except for Haiti, it was literally hell on earth and they had to keep importing slaves because the natural birth rate couldn't hold a candle to the death rate on the sugar plantations.
Haitian sugar plantations weren't much different from Barbadian sugar plantations, Jamaican sugar plantations, or even Louisiana sugar plantations. They were all absolutely horrific places to work, and chewed through human lives at ridiculous speeds.
It was all bad, but I only really know a fair amount about Haitian plantations, I can't speak to those others, but I'm sure they were...not good.
It was the nature of the work. Sugarcane is a thick, tough grass with similar dimensions to adult bamboo.
During planting, the slaves hade to dig 4-6 ft. square holes half a foot deep (60-100 squares per slave per day, or between 1k-2k cubic feet of earth each), use that earth to build up banks/causeways between the squares, then emplace cane seeds in the squares, surrounded by a few dozen pounds of manure (which had to be collected from cattleyards and carried to the fields by hand or basket as well).
During harvesting, the slaves had to (1) cut down the stalks by hand, (2) strip and de-leaf the cane stalks, and (3) carry bushels of the cut and stripped stalks from the squares to the processing stations. They then had to (4) see the juices extracted from the stalks via milling, (5) carry away the pulp, (6) boil and render the cane juice through successive sets of boilers and pans down into syrup, tempered with lime juice just before the crystallization point, then left to cool into molasses (distilled in turn into rum) and semi-refined sugar crystals.
Harvesting was especially brutal because once cut, the juices in the cane would spoil and rot incredibly rapidly. As a result, plantations during harvesting seasons ran around the clock in two 12-hour shifts, as fast as the workers could go. This led to many deaths from exhaustion in the fields, loss of limbs from crushing underneath millstones, and all the other types of industrial accidents that can happen in large-scale agriculture. Slaves also died in large numbers to all the ordinary tropical diseases and malnutrition endemic to the early-modern Caribbean.
This was the standard method basically everywhere that sugar was grown on New World plantations, and was absolutely brutal.
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like you said, Haiti was hell on earth. It didn't have to be that bad. I really think the US could have done it better, even under the rule of the old south. certainly the modern US could handle it better. But instead we just... let it rot because it's not our country and we have no responsibility.
Haiti gets hundreds of millions in US aid every year. Straight up annexation would likely be cheaper and more effective in the longrun.
No thank you, do not want. If the US were any good at empire (in the classic sense), perhaps that would make sense... but we aren't and have never been.
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Yup, sucks to not be the USA. A multicultural meritocracy mostly doing it right.
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