American Negro Slavery by Ulrich Bonnell Phillips

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[Footnote 8: [Jesse Burton Harrison], _Review of the Slave Question,
extracted from the American Quarterly Review, Dec. 1832_. By a Virginian
(Richmond, 1833).]

Daniel R. Goodloe of North Carolina wrote in 1846 in a similar tone but
with original arguments. Beginning with an exposition of the South's
comparative backwardness in economic development, he showed a twofold
working of the institution of slavery as the cause. For one thing it
lessened the vigor of industry by degrading labor in the estimation of the
poor and engendering pride in the rich; but far more important, it required
employers to sink large amounts of capital in the purchase of laborers
instead of permitting them to pay for work, as the wage system does, out
of current proceeds. It thereby particularly hampered the growth of
manufactures, for in such lines, as well as in commerce, "the fact that
slavery absorbs the bulk of Southern capital must always present an
obstacle to extensive operations." The holding of laborers as property, he
continued, can contribute nothing to production, for the destruction of the
property by the liberation of the slaves would not impair their laboring
efficiency. Hence all the individual wealth which has assumed that shape
has added nothing to the resources of the community. "Slavery merely serves
to appropriate the wages of labor--it distributes wealth, but cannot create
it." It involves expenditure in acquiring early population, then operates
to prevent land improvements and the diversification of industry,
restricting, indeed, even the range of agriculture. The monopoly which the
South has enjoyed in the production of the staples has palliated the evils
of slavery, but at the same time has expanded the system to the point of
great injury to the public. Goodloe accordingly advocated the riddance of
the institution, contending that both landowners and laborers would thereby
benefit. The continued maintenance of the institution, on the other hand,
would bring severe loss to the slaveholders, for within the coming decade
the demand of the Southwest for slaves would be sated, he thought, and
nothing but a great advancement of cotton prices and an unlimited supply of
fertile land for its production could sustain slave prices. "It is
evident that the Southern country approaches a period of great and sudden
depreciation in the value of slave property."[9]

[Footnote 9: [D.R. Goodloe], _Inquiry into the Causes which have retarded
the Accumulation of Wealth and Increase of Population in the
Southern States, in which the question of slavery is considered in a
politico-economic point of view. By a Carolinian_. (Washington, 1846.)
_See also_ a similar essay by the same author in the U.S. Commissioner of
Agriculture's _Report_ for 1865, pp. 102-135.]

The statistical theme of the South's backwardness was used by many other
essayists in the period for indicting the slaveholding regime. With most
of these, however, exemplified saliently by H.R. Helper, logic was to such
extent replaced with vehemence as to transfer their writings from the
proper purview of economics to that of sectional controversy.

On the other hand, Thomas R. Dew, whose cogent essay of 1832 marks the turn
of the prevailing Southern sentiment toward a firm support of slavery,
attributed the lack of prosperity in the South to the tariff policy of the
United States, while he largely ignored the question of labor efficiency.
His central theme was the imperative necessity of maintaining the
enslavement of the negroes on hand until a sound plan was devised and made
applicable for their peaceful and prosperous disposal elsewhere. Among
Dew's disciples, William Harper of South Carolina admitted that slave labor
was dear and unskillful, though he thought it essential for productive
industry in the tropics and sub-tropics, and he considered coercion
necessary for the negroes elsewhere in civilized society. James H. Hammond,
likewise, agreed that "as a general rule ... free labor is cheaper than
slave labor," but in addition to the factor of race he stressed the
sparsity of population in the South as a contributing element in
economically necessitating the maintenance of slavery.[10]

[Footnote 10: "Essay" (1832), Harper's "Memoir" (1838), and Hammond's
"Letters to Clarkson" (1845) are collected in the _Pro-Slavery Argument_
(Philadelphia, 1852).]

Most of the foregoing Southern writers were men of substantial position and
systematic reasoning. N.A. Ware, on the other hand who in 1844 issued in
the capacity of a Southern planter a slender volume of _Notes on Political
Economy_ was both obscure and irresponsible. Contending as his main theme
that protective tariffs were of no injury to the plantation interests, he
asserted that slave labor was incomparably cheaper than free, and attempted
to prove it by ignoring the cost of capital and by reckoning the price
of bacon at four cents a pound and corn at fifteen cents a bushel. Then,
curiously, he delivered himself of the following: "When slavery shall have
run itself out or yielded to the changes and ameliorations of the times,
the owners and all dependent upon it will stand appalled and prostrate,
as the sot whose liquor has been withheld, and nothing but the bad and
worthless habit left to remind the country of its ruinous effects. The
political economist, as well as all wise statesmen in this country, cannot
think of any measure going to discharge slavery that would not be a worse
state than its existence." His own remedy for the depression prevailing at
the time when he wrote, was to divert a large proportion of the slaves from
the glutted business of staple agriculture into manufacturing, for which he
thought them well qualified.[11] Equally fantastic were the ideas of H.C.
Carey of Pennsylvania who dealt here and there with slavery in the course
of his three stout volumes on political economy. His lucubrations are
negligible for the present survey.

[Footnote 11: [N.A. Ware] _Notes on Political Economy as applicable to the
United States_. By a Southern Planter (New York, 1844), pp. 200-204.]

All these American writers except Goodloe accomplished little of
substantial quality in the field of economic thought beyond adding details
to the doctrines of Adam Smith and Say. John Stuart Mill in turn did little
more than combine the philosophies of his predecessors. "It is a truism
to assert," said he, "that labour extorted by fear of punishment is
insufficient and unproductive"; yet some people can be driven by the
lash to accomplish what no feasible payment would have induced them to
undertake. In sparsely settled regions, furthermore, slavery may afford
the otherwise unobtainable advantages of labour combination, and it has
undoubtedly hastened industrial development in some American areas. Yet,
since all processes carried on by slave labour are conducted in the rudest
manner, virtually any employer may pay a considerably greater value in
wages to free labour than the maintenance of his slaves has cost him and be
a gainer by the change.[12]

[Footnote 12: John Stuart Mill, _Principles of Political Economy_ (London,
1848, and later editions), book II, chap. 5.]

Partly concurring and partly at variance with Mill's views were those which
Edmund Ruffin of Virginia published in a well reasoned essay of 1857, _The
Political Economy of Slavery_. "Slave labor in each individual case and for
each small measure of time," he said, "is more slow and inefficient than
the labor of a free man." On the other hand it is more continuous, for
hirelings are disposed to work fewer hours per day and fewer days per year,
except when wages are so low as to require constant exertion in the
gaining of a bare livelihood. Furthermore, the consolidation of domestic
establishments, which slavery promotes, permits not only an economy in the
purchase of supplies but also a great saving by the specialization of labor
in cooking, washing, nursing, and the care of children, thereby releasing
a large proportion of the women from household routine and rendering them
available for work in the field. An increasing density of population,
however, would depress the returns of industry to the point where slaves
would merely earn their keep, and free laborers would of necessity lengthen
their hours. Finally a still greater glut of labor might come, and indeed
had occurred in various countries of Europe, carrying wages so low that
only the sturdiest free laborers could support themselves and all the
weaker ones must enter a partial pauperism. At such a stage the employment
of slaves could only be continued at a steady deficit, to relieve
themselves from which the masters must resort to a general emancipation. In
the South, however, there were special public reasons, lying in the racial
traits of the slave population, which would make that recourse particularly
deplorable; for the industrial collapse ensuing upon emancipation in the
British West Indies on the one hand, and on the other the pillage and
massacre which occurred in San Domingo and the disorder still prevailing
there, were alternative examples of what might be apprehended from orderly
or revolutionary abolition as the case might be. The Southern people, in
short, might well congratulate themselves that no ending of their existing
regime was within visible prospect.[13]

[Footnote 13: Edmund Ruffin, _The Political Economy of Slavery_ ([Richmond,
1857]).]

About the same time a writer in _DeBow's Review_ elaborated the theme that
the comparative advantages of slavery and freedom depended wholly upon the
attainments of the laboring population concerned. "Both are necessarily
recurring types of social organization, and each suited to its peculiar
phase of society." "When a nation or society is in a condition unfit for
self-government, ... often the circumstance of contact with or subjection
by more enlightened nations has been the means of transition to a higher
development." "All that is now needed for the defence of United States
negro slavery and its entire exoneration from reproach is a thorough
investigation of fact; ... and political economy ... must ... pronounce our
system ... no disease, but the normal and healthy condition of a society
formed of such mixed material as ours." "The strong race and the weak, the
civilized and the savage," the one by nature master, the other slave, "are
here not only cast together, but have been born together, grown together,
lived together, worked together, each in his separate sphere striving for
the good of each.... These two races of men are mutually assistant to each
other and are contributing in the largest possible degree consistent with
their mutual powers to the good of each other and mankind." A general
emancipation therefore could bring nothing but a detriment.[14]

[Footnote 14: _DeBow's Review_, XXI, 331-349, 443-467 (October and
November, 1856).]

What proved to be the last work in the premises before the overthrow of
slavery in the United States was _The Slave Power, its Character, Career
and Probable Designs_, by J.E. Cairnes, professor of political economy in
the University of Dublin and in Queen's College, Galway. It was published
in 1862 and reissued with appendices in the following year. Cairnes at the
outset scouted the factors of climate and negro racial traits. The sole
economic advantage of slavery, said he, consists in its facilitation
of control in large units; its defects lay in its causing reluctance,
unskilfulness and lack of versatility. The reason for its prevalence in the
South he found in the high fertility and the immense abundance of soil on
the one hand, and on the other the intensiveness of staple cultivation. A
single operative, said he, citing as authority Robert Russell's erroneous
assertion, "might cultivate twenty acres in wheat or Indian corn, but could
not manage more than two in tobacco or three in cotton; therefore the
supervision of a considerable squad is economically feasible in these
though it would not be so in the cereals." These conditions might once have
made slave labor profitable, he conceded; but such possibility was now
doubtless a thing of the distant past. The persistence of the system did
not argue to the contrary, for it would by force of inertia persist as long
as it continued to be self-supporting.

Turning to a different theme, Cairnes announced that slave labor, since it
had never been and never could be employed with success in manufacturing or
commercial pursuits, must find its whole use in agriculture; and even there
it required large capital, at the same time that the unthrifty habits
inculcated in the masters kept them from accumulating funds. The
consequence was that slaveholding society must necessarily be and remain
heavily in debt. The imperative confinement of slave labor to the most
fertile soils, furthermore, prevented the community from utilizing any
areas of inferior quality; for slaveholding society is so exclusive that it
either expels free labor from its vicinity or deprives it of all industrial
vigor. It is true that some five millions of whites in the South have no
slaves; but these "are now said to exist in this manner in a condition
little removed from savage life, eking out a wretched subsistence by
hunting, by fishing, by hiring themselves for occasional jobs, by plunder."
These "mean whites ... are the natural growth of the slave system; ...
regular industry is only known to them as the vocation of slaves, and it is
the one fate which above all others they desire to avoid."[15]

[Footnote 15: First American edition (New York, 1862), pp. 54, 78, 79.]

"The constitution of a slave society," he says again, "resolves itself into
three classes, broadly distinguished from each other and connected by no
common interest--the slaves on whom devolves all the regular industry, the
slaveholders who reap all its fruits, and an idle and lawless rabble who
live dispensed over vast plains in a condition little removed from absolute
barbarism."[16] Nowhere can any factors be found which will promote any
progress of civilization so long as slavery persists. The non-slaveholders
will continue in "a life alternating between listless vagrancy and the
excitement of marauding expeditions." "If civilization is to spring up
among the negro race, it will scarcely be contended that this will happen
while they are still slaves; and if the present ruling class are ever to
rise above the existing type, it must be in some other capacity than
as slaveholders."[17] Even as a "probationary discipline" to prepare a
backward people for a higher form of civilized existence, slavery as it
exists in America cannot be justified; for that effect is vitiated by
reason of the domestic slave trade. "Considerations of economy, ... which
under a natural system afford some security for humane treatment by
identifying the master's interest with the slave's preservation, when once
trading in slaves is practised become reasons for racking to the utmost the
toil of the slave; for when his place can at once be supplied from foreign
preserves the duration of his life becomes a matter of less moment than
its productiveness while it lasts. It is accordingly a maxim of slave
management in slave-importing countries, that the most effective economy is
that which takes out of the human chattel in the shortest space of time the
utmost amount of exertion it is capable of putting forth."[18]

[Footnote 16: Ibid., p. 60.]

[Footnote 17: Ibid., p. 83.]

[Footnote 18: First American edition (New York, 1862), p. 73.]

The force of circumstances gave this book a prodigious and lasting vogue.
Its confident and cogent style made skepticism difficult; the dearth of
contrary data prevented impeachment on the one side of the Atlantic, and
on the other side the whole Northern people would hardly criticise such a
vindication of their cause in war by a writer from whose remoteness might
be presumed fairness, and whose professional position might be taken as
giving a stamp of thoroughness and accuracy. Yet the very conditions and
method of the writer made his interpretations hazardous. An economist,
using great caution, might possibly have drawn the whole bulk of his data
from travelers' accounts, as Cairnes did, and still have reached fairly
sound conclusions; but Cairnes gave preference not to the concrete
observations of the travelers but to their generalizations, often biased
or amateurish, and on them erected his own. Furthermore, he ignored such
material as would conflict with his preconceptions. His conclusions,
accordingly, are now true, now false, and while always vivid are seldom
substantially illuminating. His picture of the Southern non-slaveholders,
which, be it observed, he applied in his first edition to five millions
or ten-elevenths of that whole white population, and which he restricted,
under stress of contemporary criticism, only to four million souls in the
second edition,[19] is merely the most extreme of his grotesqueries. The
book was, in short, less an exposition than an exposure.

[Footnote 19: Ibid., second edition (London, 1863), appendix D.]

These criticisms of Cairnes will apply in varying lesser degrees to all of
his predecessors in the field. Those who sought the truth merely were in
general short of data; those who could get the facts in any fullness were
too filled with partisan purpose. What was begun as a study was continued
as a dispute, necessarily endless so long as the political issue remained
active. Many data which would have been illuminating, such as plantation
records and slave price quotations, were never systematically assembled;
and the experience resulting from negro emancipation was then too slight
for use in substantial generalizations. The economist M'Culloch, for
example, concluded from the experience of San Domingo and Jamaica that
cane sugar production could not be sustained without slavery;[20] but the
industrial careers of Cuba, Porto Rico and Louisiana since his time have
refuted him. He, like virtually all his contemporaries in economic thought,
confused the several factors of slavery, race traits and the plantation
system; the consequent liability to error was inevitable.

[Footnote 20: J.R. M'Culloch, _Principles of Political Economy_ (fourth
edition, Edinburgh, 1849), p. 439.]

Economists of later times have nearly all been too much absorbed in current
problems to give attention to a discarded institution. Most of them have
ignored the subject of slavery altogether, and the concern of the rest with
it has been merely incidental. Nicholson, for example, alludes to it as[21]
"one of the earliest and one of the most enduring forms of poverty," and
again as "the original and universal form of bankruptcy." Smart deals with
it only as concerns the care of workingmen's children: "The one good thing
in slavery was the interest of the master in the future of his workers.
The children of the slaves were the master's property. They were always at
least a valuable asset.... But there is no such continuity in the
relation between the employer [of free labor] and his human cattle. The
best-intentioned employer cannot be expected to be much concerned about the
efficient upkeep of the workman's child when the child is free to go where
he likes.... The child's future is bound up with the father's wage. The
wage may be enough, even when low, to support the father's efficiency, but
it is not necessarily enough to keep up the efficiency of the young laborer
on which the future depends."[22] Loria deals more extensively with
slavery as affected by the valuation of labor,[23] and Gibson[24] examines
elaborately the nature of hypothetically absolute slavery in analyzing the
earnings of labor. The contributions of both Loria and Gibson will be used
below. The economic bearings of the institution in history still await
satisfactory analysis.

[Footnote 21: J.S. Nicholson, _Principles of Political Economy_ (New York,
1898), I, 221, 391.]

[Footnote 22: William Smart, _The Distribution of Income_ (London, 1899),
pp. 296, 297.]

[Footnote 23: Achille Loria, _La Costitutione Economica Odierna_ (Turin,
1899), chap. 6, part 2.]

[Footnote 24: Arthur H. Gibson, _Human Economics_ (London, 1909).]

CHAPTER XIX

BUS

An expert accountant has well defined the property of a master in his slave
as an annuity extending throughout the slave's working life and amounting
to the annual surplus which the labor of the slave produced over and above
the cost of his maintenance.[1] Before any profit accrued to the master
in any year, however, various deductions had to be subtracted from this
surplus. These included interest on the slave's cost, regardless of
whether he had been reared by his owner or had been bought for a price;
amortization of the capital investment; insurance against the slave's
premature death or disability and against his escape from service;
insurance also for his support when incapacitated whether by illness,
accident or old age; taxes; and wages of superintendence. None of these
charges would any sound method of accounting permit the master to escape.

[Footnote 1: Arthur H. Gibson, _Human Economics_ (London, 1909), p. 202.
The substance of the present paragraph and the three following ones is
mostly in close accord with Gibson's analysis.]

The maintenance of the slave at the full rate required for the preservation
of lusty physique was essential. The master could not reduce it below that
standard without impairing his property as well as lessening its immediate
return; and as a rule he could shift none of the charge to other shoulders,
for the public would grant his workmen no dole from its charity funds. On
the other hand, he was often induced to raise the scale above the minimum
standard in order to increase the zeal and efficiency of his corps. In any
case, medical attendance and the like was necessarily included in the cost
of maintenance.

The capital investment in a slave reared by his master would include
charges for the insurance of the child's mother at the time of his birth
and for her deficit of routine work before and afterward; the food,
clothing, nurse's care and incidentals furnished in childhood; the surplus
of supplies over earnings in the period of youth while the slave was not
fully earning his own keep and his overhead charges; compound interest on
all of these until the slave reached adolescence or early manhood; and a
proportion of similar charges on behalf of other children in his original
group who had died in youth. In his teens the slave's earnings would
gradually increase until they covered all his current charges, including
the cost of supervision; and shortly before the age of twenty he would
perhaps begin to yield a net return to the owner.

A slave's highest rate of earning would be reached of course when his
physical maturity and his training became complete, and would normally
continue until his bodily powers began to flag. This period would extend
in the case of male field hands from perhaps twenty-five to possibly fifty
years of age, and in the case of artizans from say thirty to fifty-five
years. The maximum valuation of the slave as property, however, would come
earlier, at the point when the investment in his production was first
complete and when his maximum earnings were about to begin; and his value
would thereafter decline, first slowly and then more swiftly with every
passing year, in anticipation of the decline and final cessation of his
earning power. Thus the ratio between the capital value of a slave and his
annual net earnings, far from remaining constant, would steadily recede
from the beginning to the end of his working life. At the age of twenty
it might well be as ten to one; at the age of fifty it would probably not
exceed four to one; at sixty-five it might be less than a parity.

In the buying and selling of nearly all non-human commodities the cost of
production, or of reproduction, bears a definite relation to the market
price, in that it fixes a limit below which owners will not continue to
produce and sell. In the case of slaves, however, the cost of rearing had
no practical bearing upon the market price, for the reason that the owners
could not, or at least did not, increase or diminish the production at
will.[2] It has been said by various anti-slavery spokesmen that many
slaveowners systematically bred slaves for the market. They have adduced no
shred of supporting evidence however; and although the present writer has
long been alert for such data he has found but a single concrete item in
the premises. This one came, curiously enough, from colonial Massachusetts,
where John Josslyn recorded in 1636: "Mr. Maverick's negro woman came to my
chamber window and in her own country language and tune sang very loud and
shril. Going out to her, she used a great deal of respect towards me, and
willingly would have expressed her grief in English. But I apprehended it
by her countenance and deportment, whereupon I repaired to my host to learn
of him the cause, for that I understood before that she had been a queen in
her own countrey, and observed a very humble and dutiful garb used towards
her by another negro who was her maid. Mr. Maverick was desirous to have a
breed of negroes, and therefore seeing she would not yield to perswasions
to company with a negro young man he had in his house, he commanded him,
will'd she nill'd she to go to bed to her--which was no sooner done than
she kickt him out again. This she took in high disdain beyond her slavery,
and this was the cause of her grief."[3]