University of Virginia Library

CHAPTER XVIII
ECONOMIC VIEWS OF SLAVERY: A SURVEY OF THE LITERATURE

IN barbaric society slavery is a normal means of conquering
the isolation of workers and assembling them in more productive
coördination. Where population is scant and money
little used it is almost a necessity in the conduct of large undertakings,
and therefore more or Jess essential for the advancement
of civilization. It is a means of domesticating savage or barbarous
men, analogous in kind and in consequence to the domestication
of the beasts of the field.[1] It was even of advantage to
some of the people enslaved, in that it saved them from extermination
when defeated in war, and in that it gave them touch
with more advanced communities than their own. But this was
counterbalanced by the stimulus which the profits of slave catching
gave to wars and raids with all their attendant injuries. Any
benefit to the slave, indeed, was purely incidental. The reason
for the institution's existence was the advantage which accrued
to the masters. So positive and pronounced was this reckoned
to be, that such highly enlightened people as the Greeks and Romans
maintained it in the palmiest days of their supremacies.

Western Europe in primitive times was no exception. Slavery
in a more or less fully typical form was widespread. When the
migrations ended in the middle ages, however, the rise of feudalism
gave the people a thorough territorial regimentation. The
dearth of commerce whether in goods or in men led gradually
to the conversion of the unfree laborers from slaves into serfs
or villeins attached for generations to the lands on which they
wrought. Finally, the people multiplied so greatly and the landless

were so pressed for livelihood that at the beginning of modern
times European society found the removal of bonds conducive
to the common advantage. Serfs freed from their inherited obligations
could now seek employment wherever they would, and
landowners, now no longer lords, might employ whom they
pleased. Bondmen gave place to hirelings and peasant proprietors,
status gave place to contract, industrial society was enabled
to make redistributions and readjustments at will, as it had never
been before. In view of the prevailing traits and the density of
the population a general return whether to slavery or serfdom
was economically unthinkable. An intelligent Scotch philanthropist,
Fletcher of Saltoun, it is true, proposed at the end of the
seventeenth century that the indigent and their children be bound
as slaves to selected masters as a means of relieving the terrible
distresses of unemployment in his times;[2] but his project appears
to have received no public sanction whatever. The fact that he
published such a plan is more a curious antiquarian item than
one of significance in the history of slavery. Not even the thin
edge of a wedge could possibly be inserted which might open a
way to restore what everyone was on virtually all counts glad to
be free of.

When the American mining and plantation colonies were established,
however, some phases of the most ancient labor problems
recurred. Natural resources invited industry inlarge units,
but wage labor was not to be had. The Spaniards fotmd a temporary
solution in impressing the tropical American aborigines,
and the English in a recourse to indented white immigrants. But
both soon resorted predominantly for plantation purposes to the
importation of Africans, for whom the ancient institution of
slavery was revived. Thus from purely economic considerations
the sophisticated European colonists of the sixteenth and seventeenth
centuries involved themselves and their descendants, with
the connivance of their home governments, in the toils of a system
which on the one hand had served their remote forbears
with good effect, but which on the other hand civilized peoples

had long and almost universally discarded as an incubus. In
these colonial beginnings the negroes were to be had so cheaply
and slavery seemed such a simple and advantageous device when
applied to them, that no qualms as to the future were felt. At
least no expressions of them appear in the records of thought extant
for the first century and more of English colonial experience.
And when apprehensions did arise they were concerned with the
dangers of servile revolt, not with any deleterious effects to arise
from the economic nature of slavery in time of peace.

Now, slavery and indented servitude are analogous to serfdom
In that they many yield to the employers all the proceeds of industry
beyond what is required for the sustenance of the laborers;
but they have this difference, immense for American purposes,
that they pemit labor to be territorially shifted, while serfdom
keeps it locally fixed. By choosing these facilitating forms of
bondage instead of the one which would have attached the laborers
to the soil, the founders of the colonial régime in industry
doubtless thought they had avoided all economic handicaps in
the premises. Their device, however, was calculated to meet the
needs of a situation where the choice was between bond labor
and no labor. As generations passed and workingmen multiplied
in America, the system of indentures for white immigrants
was automatically dissolved; but slavery for the bulk of the
negroes persisted as an integral feature of economic life,
Whether this was conducive or injurious to the prosperity of
employers and to the community's welfare became at length a
question to which students far and wide applied their faculties,
Some of the participants in the discussion considered the problem
as one in pure theory; others examined not only the abstract
ratio of slave and free labor efficiency but included in their view
the factor of negro racial traits and the prospects and probable
consequences of abolition under existing circumstances. On the
one point that an average slave might be expected to accomplish
less in an hour's work than an average free laborer, agreement
was unanimous; on virtually every other point the views published
were so divergent as to leave the public -more or less distracted.

Adam Smith, whose work largely shaped the course economic
thought for a century following its publication in 1776,
said of slave labor merely that its cost was excessive by reason
of its lack of zest, frugality and inventiveness. The tropical
climate of the sugar colonies, he conceded, might require the
labor of negro slaves, but even there its productiveness would
be enhanced by liberal policies promoting intelligence among the
slaves and assimilating their condition to that of freemen.[3] To
some of these points J. B. Say, the next economist to consider
the matter, took exception. Common sense must tell us, said
he, that a slave's maintenance must be less than that of a free
workman, since the master will impose a more drastic frugality
than a freeman will adopt unless a dearth of earnings requires
it. The slave's work, furthermore, is more constant, for the
master will not permit so much leisure and relaxation as the
freeman customarily enjoys. Say agreed, however, that slavery,
causing violence and brutality to usurp the place of intelligence,
both hampered the progress of invention and enervated such
free laborers as were in touch with the regime.[4]

The translation of Say's book into English evoked a reply to
his views on slavery by Adam Hodgson, an Englishman with
anti-slavery bent who had made an American tour; but his essay,
though fortified with long quotations, was too rambling and ill
digested to influence those who were not already desirous of
being convinced.[5] More substantial was an essay of 1827 by a
Marylander, James Raymond, who cited the experiences of his
own commonwealth to support his contentions that slavery hampered
economy by preventing seasonal shirtings of labor, by requiring
employers to support their operatives in lean years as
well as fat, and by hindering the accumulation of wealth by the
laborers. The system, said he, could yield profits to the masters

only in specially fertile districts; and even there it kept down the
growth of population and of land values.[6]

About the same time Dr. Thonias Cooper, president of South
Carolina College, wrote: "Slave labour is undoubtedly the dearest
kind of labour; it is all forced, and forced too from a class
of human beings who have the least propensity to voluntary labour
even when it is to benefit themselves alone." The cost of
rearing a slave to the age of self support, he reckoned, including
insurance, at forty dollars a year for fifteen years. The usual
work of a slave field hand, he thought, was barely two-thirds of
what a white laborer at usual wages would perform, and from
his earnings about forty dollars a year must be deducted for his
maintenance. When interest on the investment and a proportion
of an overseer's wages were deducted in addition, he thought
the prevalent rate, six to eight dollars a month and board valued
at forty or fifty dollars a year, for free white farm hands in the
Northern states gave a decisive advantage to those who hired
laborers over those who owned them. "Nothing will justify
slave labour in point of economy," he concluded, "but the nature
of the soil and climate which incapacitates a white man from labouring
in the summer time, as on the rich lands in Carolina and
Georgia extending one hundred miles from the seaboard."[7]

The economic vices of slavery as exemplified in Virginia were
elaborated in an essay printed in 1832 attributed to Jesse Burton
Harrison of that state. Slavery, said this essay, drives away
free workmen by stigmatizing labor, for "nothing but the most
abject necessity would lead a white man to hire himself to work
in the fields under the overseer"; it causes exhaustion of the soil
by reason of the negligence it promotes in the workmen and the
stress which overseers are fain to put upon immediate returns;
it discourages all forms of industry but plantation tillage, furthermore,
for although it has not and perhaps cannot be proved
that slaves may not be successfully employed in manufactures,

the community has gone and tends still to go, on that assumption;
it discourages mechanic skill, for the slaves never acquire
more than the rudiments of artisanry, and the planters discourage
white craftsmen by giving preference uniformly to their
own laborers. Slave labor is dearer than free, because of its
lack of incentive; the régime costs the community the services
of the immigrants who would otherwise enter; and finally it
promotes waste instead of frugality on the part of both masters
and slaves. The only means by which Virginia could procure
profit from slaves, it concluded, was that of raising them for
sale to the lower South; but such profit could only be gained
systematically at a complete sacrifice of honor.[8]

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 m 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]

The statistical theme of the South's backwardness was used
by many other essayists in the period for indicting the slaveholding
régime. 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 ad-Mitted
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]

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.

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]

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 régime
was within visible prospect.[13]

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 week, the civilized and the
savage," the one by nature master, the other slave, "are here not
only cast together, but have been born togather, grown together,
lived togther, 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 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]

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]

"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 dispersed
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]

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 tenelevenths
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.

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.

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.