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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.
Responding to a sentiment in many responses:
The Northern economy was very strong, contributing more than half the empire's shipping tonnage in colonial times and expanding after independence (American built ships flooded Europe, costing half the price to build.) The rapidly expanding canals fueled agricultural growth and population expansion. Then the industrial revolution itself etc. etc.
A few years ago, I dug deeply into slave financing namely how banks dealt with depreciation, whether they operated foreclosed plantations etc. (Generally, the solution was immediate disintermediation.) It turns out mortgages on slaves were one of the largest financial instruments in the world for a long time, with Dutch, German and French banks speculating on them.
While Jefferson could already mortgage 150 slaves to a Dutch company to build his mansion, after a crash in the 1820s, by the 1830s the slave bond market had grown to be 30x the size of all slaves and land in the South combined. When the price of cotton crashed again (Panic of 1837), interest payments alone were $33 million, while the whole Southern cotton crop was only worth $10 million. 343 of 850 US banks failed. The Southern states (all banks were state chartered) both refused to foreclose and to pay interest, cutting the South off from the global financial system, as they unilaterally waived debts (since the plantation owners ran the governments.) Until that point, slavery was state subsidized, profitable primarily through financial engineering (like Canada's real estate driven GDP today) because the states took on the debts of the large estates.
In the late 1840s, the process resumed. In 1828 a laborer could go for $300, rising above $600 in 1838, falling back under $300 before reaching $700 in 1860. Estates operated less on cash flows from farming and more on refinancing after asset appreciation. Furthermore, in the old South, soil had depleted too, such that cotton production slowly moved West to new lands and without constant expansion, when the new South's soil would deplete, the whole institution would collapse hence the expansionist drive.
https://www.nber.org/chapters/c0606.pdf
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This seems like as good a place as any to write about something I'd been thinking about for a while, especially since it's at least kind of against your point.
Saying the Civil War was caused by Slavery never seemed satisfying to me. It's not exactly wrong per se, but it doesn't feel like it really captures the spirit of what happened and why. I think a better thesis is that Slavery was the lynchpin of the war, the thing that caused the pre-existing cultural split to become an economic split and a more specific political split, that gave rise to there being specific territories motivated to rebel.
I think the true cause is the cultural split that goes back to the founding of the nation. Albion’s Seed stuff. Borderers and Cavaliers vs Puritans and Quakers. (I've only actually read Scott's review of it, I probably should read the actual book sometime). In this view, it was the Cavaliers who really loved themselves some slavery. For reasons I haven't entirely fleshed out, the Borderers and Cavaliers came to be allied and to mostly occupy the same territory. I guess they could tolerate each other at least. Meanwhile, the Puritans and Quakers similarly allied with each other, and each side had at least a vague feeling that they didn't really like the other side and they were the Other, the Outgroup. They managed to ally with each other long enough to fight and win the American Revolution, but they never did really get along that well, not well enough to be comfortable building a more centralized state for them all to live under.
At the time of the founding of the nation, the plantation farming with slavery that the Cavaliers loved so dearly was in fact the most economically productive thing going on in the nation. This gave the slaveholder class tremendous political power, far too much to take any action against slavery. The cultures that made up what would become the North never really liked slavery. It became a rallying point for both sides - the whole proto-South became more and more into how awesome Slavery was, even the ones who would never be able to afford a single slave, and meanwhile, the proto-North became more and more into how shitty it was and how it had to go. And so both sides went on, constantly provoking each other about it. But it's just an excuse, the real cause was always the cultural split.
In the background to all this is the gigantic freight train of Industrialization. Slow moving but massive and inexorable. The proto-North and the cultures that made it up really loved them some Industrialization. They went all-in on that, in opposition to plantation slavery. It wasn't that great at the time of the founding of the nation, but it kept slowly advancing and gaining more power. That economic domination slowly but surely started slipping away from the slavers who, due to their own culture, were unable to see it coming and shift away from slavery and towards industry. But a slow shift of economic trends is tough to fight a war over. The election of Lincoln, though, that did it. A bright neon sign saying that the slaveholder class could no longer rely on their economic clout to dominate national politics.
And so, to war! A war actually motivated by that tribal hatred, but which the slavery issue had provided plenty of more rational-seeming Casus Belli.
Industrialization was still very new, and nobody really understood how it would affect war. In the old way of war, winning the day was much more dependent on individual courage, daring, and clever maneuvering of units. The South was actually pretty well-equipped to fight this sort of war against the North. Hence why they did better than expected at first. The North was slow to understand the advantages that Industrialization gave them and how to use those advantages to maximum extent. But they did eventually. In the new way of war, non-industrialized opponents would be crushed under a mountain of manufactured goods. Individual courage and clever maneuvers mean little when your opponent out-produces you 10 to 1 or more. Parts of the Southern regime probably saw this eventually, but there wasn't much they could do about it.
Near as I can tell, the cultural effect of the war was to decisively crush the Cavalier culture for good - I don't see any sign of them being still around now. The Borderers are still around, and don't seem to have been that affected. I understand that many of them checked out of the Civil War when it really started going south for the South. Perhaps they said to themselves something to the effect of, hold on, why am I charging superior Union firepower to preserve the right of these other rich guys to own slaves? And the war and reconstruction era didn't shut down anything central to their culture. So I guess they survived.
I think this is all very relevant to today's situation. We've still got the same cultural split, and the temperature is getting pretty high, only now, there isn't a firm lynchpin to actually fight over. Nothing to define specific territory as being on one side or the other, nothing to motivate the less-cultural to join the fight and tolerate the sacrifices warfare requires. And so, it's not really clear what actually happens.
The borderers mostly fought for the union, actually- heavily borderer areas were more opposed to the confederacy.
It's certainly true that the average poor white in the south had some borderer blood, along with being descended from indentured servants, cavalier bastards and hangers-on, etc. But 100% borderer populations fought for the north.
That seems very plausible to me. Do you know of anywhere I could read more about that? In addition to the sibling's mention of West Virginia.
East Tennessee is another good example. I don't know of too many books about the subject, but here's one I have read: "War at Every Door: Partisan Politics and Guerrilla Violence in East Tennessee, 1860-1869." There's also this article about Unionist sentiment in north Alabama: "Civil War Unionists and the Political Culture of Loyalty in Alabama, 1860-1861."
The idea of Unionist Southerners being willing to turn on the Confederacy was prominent enough that Lincoln based Union war strategy on appealing to them for a significant portion of the war.
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One of my favorite Civil War factoids is that West Virginia actually re-seceded from Virginia to rejoin the Union.
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There’s an argument to be made that progressive gender stuff - the cluster of political/cultural issues including gay marriage, trans stuff, and abortion - are rapidly becoming the lynchpin. As the religiously conservative parts of the country becoming increasingly retrenched about these issues, it seems the progressive parts are doubling down on embracing the most extreme versions of them as a way to crystallize their differences.
In the most recent episode of Alex Kaschuta’s Subversive podcast, her guest made the interesting argument that part of what is driving the massive and rapid proliferation of people identifying as trans/nonbinary/GNC is simply that people in progressive spheres are adopting these identities as a way to formally mark themselves as distinct from the chuds and firmly loyal to one side of the simmering cultural conflict. “MAGAts won’t shut up about how gross trans people are, how they want to infiltrate women’s and children’s spaces to rape them, etc.? Well, if the chuds hate trans people, the trans must be doing something right! Count me in!”
Similarly, women who thirty years ago would have seen abortion as a deeply tragic last resort (“safe, legal, and rare”) now seem to be flirting with embracing it as a positive good. And not just as a thing we should encourage the underclass to do - the stance of early abortion advocates like Sanger - but as a thing that even affluent high-status people should be able to do freely and without any consequences or even social censure. (No big deal at all!) All as a defensive reactionary instinct triggered by conservative overreach and aggression on the issue.
Maybe there's some of that, but I have the impression of a lot of it being driven by progressivism having nothing to offer young women other than scaremongering about 'you're gonna get raped'. Like the tradcon offer of 'you can be a housewife and have lots of kids' is at least an offer and not just a discussion about how much being a woman sucks.
Like duh, if I was a woman being told there's nothing special or different about being a woman except that it makes you a victim, I wouldn't want to be one anymore.
Sure, but you’re a man with presumably a male-brained orientation as to how you perceive yourself and your relation with the world.
By their revealed preferences when it comes to rape fantasies, true crime, hybristophilia, dark triad men and whatnot, a substantial proportion (perhaps the majority) of women rather enjoy envisioning themselves as victims, or at least potential victims.
A woman wanting to be raped by a particular man, or subset of men, does not mean she wants to be raped by whoever has the opportunity to do so. Like fifty shades of gray was pretty clear the guy was hot and rich.
“Women don’t actually want to be raped by literally every man ever” is not in the slightest incompatible with “many women genuinely quite like perceiving themselves as victims or potential victims, enjoy the social power assuming that mantle gives them over others, and will often happily recontextualise their prior experiences as victimhood in order to capitalise on social sympathy”. Given how we relate to the sexes and the amount of empathy afforded to each, the return-on-investment of damselling is probably higher for women than men.
Victimhood politics only exist because portraying oneself as a victim lacking agency can be a very useful power to wield over others. It gives one the sledgehammer of social power and moral superiority, and is sufficiently covert and by-proxy so as to allow one a huge amount of plausible deniability. Voicing one’s (real or imagined) victimhood can certainly also foster internal feelings of being Stunning And Brave.
In other words, I don’t think people actually have this aversion to victimhood. It’s a status that lots of people, and I suspect particularly women, actively seek out, at least in terms of how they are perceived. It’s probably a less healthy self-concept than viewing oneself as effectual and capable, but it is adaptive, it can be utterly intoxicating to wield, and it is often the case that telling someone that they are not in fact uniquely victimised or at risk of such invokes outrage, not relief. Non-binary identification is just another facet of these kinds of status games.
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I think I've seen this in teenage boys in white progressive households. At some point, they realize that they are becoming a straight white cis dude, and getting older by the minute. And if they've been mouthing comments putting down "stale pale male" people for years, they need to change something fast.
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Interestingly, I don't think this is true. If you assume that a united Democratic Party keeps Douglas's votes + Brekenridge's + Bell's, Lincoln still wins the Electoral College (with 169/303 EVs instead of the 180 he got). The Lincoln vote is very efficient because he carries a lot of northern states by small margins over Douglas, and isn't on the ballot at all in the South so he doesn't waste votes in states he can't win.
For a united Democratic Party to win (presumably with Douglas as the nominee), they need to pick up some Lincoln votes as well - and that doesn't seem particularly likely. Looking at the states where Lincoln got just over 50%, Douglas would need to pick up NY, OH or IL and IN. We know that Lincoln outpolls Douglas in Illinois in a straight matchup (the Republicans won the popular vote in the 1858 Illinois state legislature elections following the Lincoln-Douglas debates, but the Democrats won more seats so Douglas was elected senator, and there was a further swing to the Republicans between 1858 and 1860).
The Southern secessionist narrative sure looks better in a scenario where Lincoln was elected President as a 40-60 popular vote loser!
In a world where Douglas gets the United Democratic ticket, you have a more conciliatory South, which potentially helps flip OH or IN. But perhaps you're right: the North seemed pretty done with compromise too.
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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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I recall that during this period, US tariff policies meant that much of government spending was funded by Southerners importing foreign luxury goods at a mark-up. This money would then be spent on many things, including developing railways in the North. Northern industries were shielded from foreign competition while the South had to compete in world markets. This made the South quite angry, causing one of the many pre-war crises. There was a long struggle with different parties raising and lowering tariffs, Lincoln's Republican Party was elected on a platform of raising tariffs significantly.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tariff_of_Abominations
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Nullification_crisis
This is not to say that slavery was not a primary contributor to the war but there were a range of issues causing division.
Somehow, plantation owners burning big piles of money buying Italian art funded the Industrial Revolution a thousand miles away. I'm really not connecting the dots here. Didn't every country in the world have rich aristocrats at this time?
The distribution of taxes is important. There was no income tax at this point, the main source of revenue for the whole country was taxing trade. The US tariff policy was designed to develop industries like metalworking, shielding them from superior British competition. It strengthened Northern industry by weakening foreign competition and some of the revenue went to developing infrastructure in the North, at least more than went to the South.
Effectively there was South-to-North wealth transfer, which made Southerners angry.
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I think the whole debate is a little pedantic, since (as you note) many of these issues are highly interrelated. The foreign policy dimension is also understated since Britain was both the center of the abolitionist movement and the main exporter of industrial/manufactured goods to the US, chafed at tariffs, was worried about the Union invading Canada or causing trouble for the Caribbean colonies and sympathized to some extent culturally with the South. The stereotypical Dixie argument can be made persuasively and isn't wrong, it just lies by omission; the same is true for the union 'it was just about slavery' argument.
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Can you expand on this? I can understand your later argument (that expanding slavery = increased profits from the slave trade), but why would expanding slavery be necessary for the profitability of existing cotton plantations?
In general, I think you're missing the massive impact of the Haitian Revolution and its aftermath -- the genocide of all white inhabitants of Haiti by Jacques Dessalines created an existential fear in the South (shared by both slaveholders and yeomen farmers who did not participate in slavery) that abolition would result in the bloody death of everyone they knew. This fear was periodically amplified by the German Coast Rebellion, Nat Turner's Rebellion, and the attack on Harper's Ferry. This is why Jefferson wrote his famous letter to John Holmes, calling the Missouri Compromise a "fire bell in the night" and "knell of the Union". The most important quote from that letter gets a lot less attention than it deserves:
That was his entire argument against immediate abolition, and in favor of gradual emancipation. This thinking also led to the proposed solution: to spread slavery further and further into the western territories. The reasoning goes: the more evenly distributed the slave population was, the less concentrated the slave population in the Deep South was, the less the risk of a genocide when they are inevitably freed. That at least was the initial reasoning -- the cognitive dissonance between 'slavery must end' and 'we must spread it' led to the rise of racism (i.e., slavery isn't bad because the slaves deserve to be treated this way, whether 'Curse of Ham' or genetic inferiority) as well as an incredibly paranoid totalitarian treatment of slaves in the South (e.g., the ban on teaching slaves to read/write was specifically due to Nat Turner being a literate black who was inspired by reading about the Haitian Revolution).
In other words, the political extremism of the South was motivated less by the greed of the plantation class, and more by the overwhelming fear of a slave revolt. Whether that fear was justified is debatable -- though at least John Brown thought the fears were justified, as his final message asserted that "the crimes of this guilty land will never be purged away, but with Blood" -- but the fact and reality of such fears is I think undeniable.
There are, it seems, immediately obvious solutions to "emancipation will cause white genocide" and the south rejected all of the ones that would entail freeing any slaves, including "just kill every black man, woman, and child in the USA". Attachment to slavery was a pretty big deal in understanding southern thinking.
I agree that attachment to slavery was a big deal, but it doesn't have to be for you to choose not to commit massacres. You could just be opposed to massacres.
Yes, they could be- but they also opposed things like gradual emancipation as happened in parts of Latin America, government buy back schemes, repatriation, etc.
I have always been ignorant of this. Why did the US not buy back slaves? I haven't seen anything about opposition to the plan from the south.
Because the south wanted to keep its slaves and then lost a war.
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Sure. Here I was not talking about the Cotton Plantations in the new southwest, but slavery in Virginia, Kentucky, and the Carolinas that mainly was concerned with providing new slaves for plantations in the west. Without the expansion of those plantations, slavery would be no longer be profitable for these states. And these were the states that most powerful and influential in congress: without Virginia and the Carolinas the Confederacy would have been short-lived indeed.
I'm not sure I buy the slave revolt argument fully. The south was continually expanding its slave population to work new plantations. You see an exponential (in the mathematical sense) of the enslaved population from ~700,000 in 1790 to 4 million in 1860. Now during that time the number and size of slave states also increased substantially, but if you look at this map, the percentage of enslaved peoples in Eastern counties doesn't seem to really decrease with Western expansion. Looks to me like the economics of the plantation were more important than the fear of slave revolt.
However, I do see your argument that this was a powerfully motivating political force behind Southern Extremism. Funnily enough, the Republican Party also didn't really want black people to stick around in the union: Lincoln was a strong proponent of colonization and repatriation of African-Americans to Liberia.
This is difficult to square with the fact that the most enthusiastic proponents of slavery were from the Deep South. The necessary/intractable evil view survived the longest in the Upper South and the only Southern Slave State to get even mildly close to abolishing on its own was Virginia. Publicola actually misses this, too: The reason Southern emancipationists wanted to 'spread out' slavery wasn't to dilute the possibility of post-emancipation genocide, but to draw as many slaveowners out of Virginia as possible so the emancipationists could have any shot at all at winning elections.
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As it happens, I just finished a massive biography of Lincoln which covers pretty much every political contest and debate he was ever in blow by blow.
The Civil War was absolutely about slavery. The Southern states that seceded stated this very clearly; they announced their intention to secede literally the night Lincoln was elected, because they believed Lincoln wanted to abolish slavery and would try to curb its spread.
In fact, Lincoln did despise slavery and believed it would eventually have to end, but he was also a Constitutionalist and a Unionist and so accepted slavery as the law of the land, and repeatedly assured the South that he had no intention of infringing on their property rights.
Anti-slavery sentiments were not as black-and-white (hah) as "pro-abolition" or "anti-abolition." The "Ultras" were the "radical leftists" of the day who wanted immediate emancipation and full suffrage for blacks, and Lincoln avoided being associated with them; he thought they were too extreme and he disliked their moralizing. There was a full spectrum of less radical views (gradual ending of slavery, with compensation for slaveowners, with blacks maybe being allowed to settle in other territories, or maybe being sent back to Africa), but very few abolitionists were for full equality.
The South's objections were that the Republicans wanted to forbid expanding slavery to new territories - which, since the political divide then was between slave states and non-slave states, essentially meant the South would be increasingly outnumbered in Congress as the country expanded. The North also very much resented the fugitive slave laws - even Northerners who weren't abolitionists and didn't care much about blacks hated being forced to cooperate with Southern slave-catchers. (Keep in mind also that the South wanted to make abetting escaped slaves a capital crime, and many Southern states essentially criminalized being an abolitionist even before the war.)
Some of the claims that the Civil War "wasn't about slavery" originate in Lincoln's own arguments. During the war, he frequently had to call up more men, and was constantly trying to balance the concerns of the border states in particular, as well as trying to entice the South to cease rebelling. (Towards the end, he took a much more hardline stance towards reconstruction, but earlier in the war the South had many opportunities to concede under very generous terms.) The North believed they were fighting to suppress a rebellion and preserve the Union, and being told they were fighting "to free the slaves" didn't go over well with a lot of Northerners, so Lincoln couldn't allow it to be framed that way. (And, again, had the South surrendered earlier, they probably could have kept their slaves.) But the fact was that the war was about slavery, and it was caused by people who (1) wanted to keep their slaves, (2) wanted to expand slavery, (3) wanted to write it into the Constitution that slavery could never be abolished.
Not quite true. Douglas advocated the doctrine of "Popular Sovereignty," which meant basically that new territories should be allowed to vote on whether or not slavery would be allowed there. The problem with this (and the reason why Popular Sovereignty was basically abandoned as a political platform) is that it not only tried to trump the Congressional prerogative to vote on the status of new territories, but it explicitly rolled back previous agreements such as the Missouri Compromise. (The result of this did not turn out well.)
Right thanks for the clarification on Douglas. I think what I was trying to show with that line was how unreasonable the southern position on the slavery in the territories question was. Lincoln's position was to ban it entirely, and Douglas wanted to keep the post-Kansas/Nebraska Act status quo (territories could decide on the slavery question by popular sovereignty). You could imagine a third position between Lincoln and Douglas that reverted to the Missouri Compromise. But no, the slaveholding politicians in the south had to have slavery in ALL the territories, regardless of the desires of the population. I can see how this was intolerable to even the non-abolitionists in the north, and it almost seems to me that the South knew so too (and thus was trying to start a war that they should have known they would have lost).
Anyway, thanks for the book rec and clarification. I'm working my way through Bruce Catton's History of the Civil War right now too.
That's still not quite correct. Lincoln's position was not to ban slavery until the very end of the Civil War. During his debates with Douglas (both for the senate, and later during the presidential election), Lincoln was always very clear that while he disliked slavery, he was not seeking to abolish it (at least, not until the rest of the country had chosen to do that by democratic means).
That's overstating the case a little. The South obviously preferred that new territories be slave territories, but generally they sought "parity" - as long as there were some slave territories to balance free territories, they didn't actually expect that every new territory would necessarily allow slavery. There might have been some Southerners who'd have liked to just dictate that all new territories would allow slavery by default, but mostly both sides spent the decades leading up to the Civil War trying to maintain some kind of balance (hence the multiple compromise bills, that of course ultimately failed).
The South increasingly moved towards the idea of secession - they had been threatening to secede for decades, whenever they didn't get their way. This was part of the reason why Lincoln and the Republicans (and Buchanan before him) didn't move more decisively when the South made secession noises when it became apparent Lincoln had won. It sounded very much like "Oh, this again." But it should also be said that the South did not actually expect to have to fight a total war against the North. When the war began, both sides thought it would be brief; the North expected the South to be quickly brought back into line after a few token battles and then some more compromises; the South expected the North to let them go once they demonstrated they were really serious.
As far as I understand it Lincoln wanted to ban the spread of slavery to the territories. From the Republican platform of the Chicago convention of 1860, clause 8:
So no, Lincoln didn't want to ban slavery, but he wanted to prevent its spread into territories that had not yet been granted statehood.
This is in contrast to the Southern Democratic Party that wanted slaveholders to be allowed to bring their property (i.e. slaves) into all the territories, effectively making slavery legal everywhere that was not already a state. Now, once these territories were granted statehood, the new states could ban slavery as before. From the Southern Democratic platform of 1860, clause 1:
This clause was completely unacceptable to the North for obvious reasons, on top of recent rollbacks of previous compromises (the Kansas/Nebraska Act undid much of the Missouri compromise), hence the party split and Lincoln's victory in the election.
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