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Notes -
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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