Did Slavery Make The US Wealthy? (independence, crime, dollars, financial)

[ovcatto]

Originally Posted by harborlady

If the south had it to do all over again I wonder if they'd see the invention of the cotton gin, advances in textile industry and faster transport methods was the golden opportunity to end slavery & hire them as labor outright.

Oh goodness, how did I miss that one???

As any 5th grader should remember, slavery was in fact in decline until Eli Whitney's invention of the cotton gin which made Cotton King and with it an increased emphasis on industrial level cotton production and the slaves that worked to grow it. Industrialization was a boom for cotton and slavery.

Cotton Gin | Economic History Services

As for railroads...

Slaveholding expanded in the Wiregrass and in the Appalachian mountains, and commercial agriculture developed in the wake of the railroads. The fastest growing regions of the South, especially along the western border of Texas, Arkansas, and Missouri, demonstrated just how compatible slavery was with southern railroad growth.

Southern railroad companies began buying slaves as early as the 1840s and used enslaved labor almost exclusively to construction their lines. Thousands of African Americans worked on the southern railroads in the 1850s.

Railroads and the Making of Modern America | Case Studies

[Frankie117]

Originally Posted by MeSoBe

The figure generally understood among academics is 25%. That number moves higher when you include northern states before the abolition of slavery in the north.

Well, I am going to need a citation for that claim. The 1860 census shows otherwise.

[LexusNexus]

Originally Posted by knowledgeiskey

Many on the left say that the US became wealthy due to its past history of slavery, which embodies the system of capitalism. On the contrary, many others have the argument that it's the US's innovation and industrialization that made it wealthy.

Conservatives like to think that they are superior and that their gains are the result of hard work and innovation. They are afraid of intelligent people of other races, racially-insensitive, and fearful. Superior, this is not. It has hampered wealth in the US.

The US would be infinitely MORE wealthy had slavery never happened, and we would be enjoying a society that was far, far more advanced than what we are experiencing today. Enormous, wasteful, negative energy has been expended by generations of white slaveowners and their descendents to deny equal opportunity to native americans, black people, and to a lesser extent other minorites. Rather than embracing the uniqueness, brilliance, versatility, strength, intelligence, power, and character of others, this shameful group has continued to subjugate these groups to protect the unearned privilege. The result is that innovation has been stymied and society has been crippled for generations by bigotry, ignorance, and conservative head-in-the-sand regressive policies. This small-mindedness and practice of exclusion hampered the development of wealth in ALL people here.

So, while conservatives like to think that their gains are the result of their superior talents, this is not the case. Your unearned privilege allowed you to profit from exploitation and protect your gains through disciminatory policies and good ol boy networks. By being bigots over many generations, you actually prevented the US from being far more wealthier and inclusive.

So IMO, slavery and the attitudes that continue to favor discrimination, prevent the US from being far wealthier than it could be.

[JazzyTallGuy]

Originally Posted by Motion

Then why didn't other countries where the land was also stolen from their native populations end up just as wealthy as the U.S? Every country in the western hemispher was stolen from the natives of that country.

If you look at the former Spanish colonies just about all of them had social and economic system THAT DID NOT ALLOW FOR SOCIAL MOBILITY.

In other words to this day the ruling elite in most Central and South American countries are the descendents of former Spanish colonist. That concentration of wealth and lack of social mobility didn't allow for the type of innovation and economic expansion that the United States had.

[MeSoBe]

Originally Posted by Frankie117

Well, I am going to need a citation for that claim. The 1860 census shows otherwise.

I'd be happy to provide several but I have to say, the link you provided doesn't actually support your statement. It's just a link to pdfs. Parsing out the relevant information would be more helpful - a page, paragraph even a screenshot.

[Frankie117]

Originally Posted by MeSoBe

I'd be happy to provide several but I have to say, the link you provided doesn't actually support your statement. It's just a link to pdfs. Parsing out the relevant information would be more helpful - a page, paragraph even a screenshot.

Actually this page might be more useful, someone already did the work of extracting the information.

[lucknow]

Originally Posted by ovcatto

For the zillionth time, did the money earned by plantation owners remain solely in the hands of plantation owners? Was their cotton shipped and sold in mercantile exchanges for free? When they required increased capital to purchase land, supplies, more slaves did their interest payments just sit in their pockets?

Actually it has been mentioned quite often, particularly on the threads of this very board debating the cause of the Civil War. By the way, the immediate ambition was to expand slavery into the territories to the WEST.

You sound like someone who would believe in the theory of "Trickle down" economics. The 1000 families who were big planters and owned the majority of the slaves had yearly income of 50 million dollars. The entire rest of the population which was 660 thousand families had a yearly income of 60 million dollars. So the vast majority of the profits made by the slave system did not benefit the vast majority of the people at all. The ratio of income from the big planters to the rest of the society was almost 660 to one.

[MeSoBe]

Originally Posted by Frankie117

Actually this page might be more useful, someone already did the work of extracting the information.

Regarding that calculation, the number of slaveowners was divided by the number of slaves. The problem is that in many cases everyone in the slaveholders family was counted as a slaveowner. While morally accurate it's technically incorrect. Children didn't own the slaves of their father. It skews the number downward and it's incorrect.


Schools
"Almost one-third of all Southern families owned slaves. In Mississippi and South Carolina the slave population approached one half of the total population. Eighty-eight percent of slave owners held fewer than twenty slaves, and nearly fifty percent owned fewer than five.

• In the Lower South, where the first states seceded—SC, GA, MS, AL, TX, FL—about 37% of the white families owned slaves.
  
  In the Middle South, the states that seceded only after Fort Sumter was fired upon—VA, NC, TN, AR—the percentage is about 25%.
  
  The total for the two combined regions is about 31%.
  
  In the Border States—DE, MD, KY, MO—the percentage of slave ownership was about 16%. These slave-holding states did not secede and remained in the Union.
  
  The total throughout the slave states was 26%."

- Montgomery County Public Schools (http://www.mcps.org/ss/5thgrade/selectedstat.pdf - broken link)


Educational programming
"Fully 3/4 of Southern whites did not even own slaves; of those who did, 88% owned twenty or fewer." - PBS: Africans in America ...which would mean 25% did own slaves and that is backed up by economic and social historians.


Economic and social historians
" Less than one-quarter of white Southerners held slaves, with half of these holding fewer than five and fewer than 1 percent owning more than one hundred. In 1860, the average number of slaves residing together was about ten." - Economic History Association


Amateur historians
"Slavery in the antebellum South was not a monolithic system; its nature varied widely across the region. At one extreme one white family in thirty owned slaves in Delaware; in contrast, half of all white families in South Carolina did so. Overall, 26 percent of Southern white families owned slaves."- Shotgun's Home of the Civil War


Historian superstars
"Even more revealing was their attachment to slavery. Among the enlistees in 1861, slightly more than one in ten owned slaves personally. This compared favorably to the Confederacy as a whole, in which one in every twenty white persons owned slaves. Yet more than one in every four volunteers that first year lived with parents who were slaveholders. Combining those soldiers who owned slaves with those soldiers who lived with slaveholding family members, the proportion rose to 36 percent.

That contrasted starkly with the 24.9 percent, or one in every four households, that owned slaves in the South, based on the 1860 census. Thus, volunteers in 1861 were 42 percent more likely to own slaves themselves or to live with family members who owned slaves than the general population.

The attachment to slavery, though, was even more powerful. One in every ten volunteers in 1861 did not own slaves themselves but lived in households headed by non family members who did. This figure, combined with the 36 percent who owned or whose family members owned slaves, indicated that almost one of every two 1861 recruits lived with slaveholders." -
Joseph Glatthaar (http://history.unc.edu/faculty/glatthaar.html - broken link) in General Lee's Army (You can also access the quote via this link)


Historic Publications
"... Donald is even more emphatic elsewhere when he complains that "writers speak of the Southern interest in slavery, even when they perfectly well know that in the 'plantation' South only one fourth of the white families owned any slaves at all.' (3) Roy F. Nichols and Elbert B. Smith assume the same stances (4) as do the authors of practically all the outstanding college textbooks on the history of the United States." Civil War History,*Dec. 2004


Federal Government
1850 South Atlantic 31% and East South Central 32%



- The Social and Economic Status of the Black Population in the United States: An Historical View, 1790-1978. Current Population Reports, Special Studies, Series P-23, No. 80 by the Bureau of the Census (DOC), Suitland, MD. Population Div. (http://www.eric.ed.gov/PDFS/ED175974.pdf - broken link)

[ovcatto]

Originally Posted by lucknow

You sound like someone who would believe in the theory of "Trickle down" economics.

I prefer to terming "deluge up and trickle down economics", otherwise known as Classical Economics.

The 1000 families who were big planters and owned the majority of the slaves had yearly income of 50 million dollars. The entire rest of the population which was 660 thousand families had a yearly income of 60 million dollars. So the vast majority of the profits made by the slave system did not benefit the vast majority of the people at all. The ratio of income from the big planters to the rest of the society was almost 660 to one.

If read back through my posts I think that you would be hard pressed to find a statement where I argued that all of this great wealth flowed evenly down the economy, the reason being, I would never make such a statement.

Secondly, you seem to be trapped in an micro economic view one that seems to be purely regional in nature view. My argument is based upon macro economic analysis looking at the aggregate impact of the slave economy and its impact on the national economy.

[ovcatto]

My it has gotten awful quiet in here.