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FYI, the South is still largely agricultural, dependent on cheap labor. Who's ever heard of "the industrial South"? lol... that land and climate is well suited to growing crops. and NO, food wasn't a big expense for the plantations, they grew their own cheap corn, beans, fatback and greens (rather, the slaves did).
And also, the big bonus with slaves, was that they REPRODUCED MORE SLAVES. for "free"- didn't have to buy them in the market. A slave woman was probably expected to produce several brand new slaves in her child bearing years. THEY SOLD THEM FOR PROFIT TOO- THE SLAVES THEMSELVES WERE A CASH CROP!
Health cost? most people never had any medical care to speak of, slave or free, in the 19th century. They had folk remedies/ healers and midwives on site.
Idk if you've ever seen those shacks the slaves (and many more recent generations of blacks) had to live in , in the rural deep south- I have seen them. But you see, it's quite warm there, so it's not as big a deal to have thin walls or cheap housing since you're pretty warm, and that is half of good health. The rural South is quite frankly a very comfy and scenic, beautiful place if you can stand the heat, and Africans naturally could for the most part, being already adapted to it. When they fled the South for the dark cold Northern cities, that's when they started to have epidemics of rickets etc due to the climate. Even today, being poor in the deep South just isn't as harsh a reality as being poor in a Northern city, because the weather makes it easier, especially in winter. Now lots of Northern Blacks are moving back to the South into nice (warm) neighborhoods full of successful Black families in places like Atlanta.
The plantation owners went to very little expense to maintain thier slaves. The slaves were cheaped out in every way- and they made all their own clothes, etc. I would say they were NOT expensive to maintain in relation to the profits they produced.
The kinds of crops largely produced in the deep south are not the same as the grain harvests of the midwest and plains, they are more varied and basically, veggie row crops that require to this day, manual labor. Guess who does it now? ILLEGAL ALIENS who get paid very low wages!!!! forcing many southern rural blacks onto welfare for lack of work! Farmers often ONLY hire illegal aliens. Machines weren't all that available until maybe 60 years after that war... and since then, they have always been expensive and still require people to work them, plus all the labor intensive things that machines can't do in Southern farming.
I think a big part of what killed slavery was the Northern abolitionists who, whether anyone here believes it or not, felt it was offensive to their sensitive Christian conscience to continue to oppress other humans. Which set other things in motion. It would be a mistake to underestimate the popularity of the abolitionist movement and the kinds of "christian conscience activism" going on in the middle and upper classes of the Industrial North. It was huge back then.
Of course, the real thing that killed slavery altogether, and abruptly, was the South's move to secede. That's what set the big war machine into motion. The slaves were freed in part, so that Lincoln could call them to arms - they were in fact called out to join the union side to fight for their freedom. And of course many did join. It weakened the whole apparatus of the South's war effort. The North had created a domestic front in the South. A war strategy. The point was to preserve the Union of all the states. And it worked, at huge cost and with terrible upheaveal.
It might have been better for everyone, if the transition away from slavery had just gone slowly but surely instead of a war. Because after the war, millions of unprepared slaves were dumped out into the strange off-plantation white world on their own with very little, and the plantations were abruptly cut off . It was devastating. Not to mention, all the dead on both sides... and the wounded. At least one of my great grandfathers was in that war, he was a casualty. There were tons of orphans and widows on both sides. There should have been a transition instead of a war.
But i can't see how it was capitalism that ended slavery- maybe the North's, but not the South's. the South's capitalism did depend on the slaves, it suffered a long time after the War. They were plenty cost efficient and profitable, and would have still been. So it wasn't about that for the South.
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Originally Posted by branh0913
While it is a commonly help view that capitalism only persist on cheap labor, one must also look at how things are produced to get a better idea of the motivations of capitalist. Back when the USA economy was primarily focused on agriculture, slavery actually would have made good business sense. Paying each farm hand would have been prohibitively expensive, and as a result slave labor insured a 1 time payment to get several decades of work.
However things changed with automation and the industrial revolution. Because now machinary could now produce faster than a human being, it appears that the initial investment was better spent on machinary and not slaves. Slavery had to have been prohibitely expensive compared to automation solutions at the time. Let's look at why slavery probably became expensive...
You had to have slaves who were field hands. But you also had to make sure they were fed (a big expense), clothed (not too expensive, but an expense nontheless) and that they were in good and healthy shake (also expensive). Cradle to the slave enslavement could not have possibly have remained a sustainable model. When compared to technological advancements at the time, slavery basically became obsolete.
With the North pretty much taking the lead in the manufacturing game, they really had no need for slavery at the time either. And the south could not compete with the rampant growth in the North. It's highly doubtful that even withot the civial war, many southern farmers would have just went bankrupt anyway, freeing the slaves anyway.
It is my firm opinion that because America is now at war with capitalism, and most of the people in power does not want capitalism shown in a possible light. But when you think about it, whether you like it or not, capitalism killed slavery in America. We can always give it to the civil war, but we all know America isn't kind enough to just end something that was making money. The reality is probably that there was no money in slavery anymore, and was just officially put out of it's misery.
Would love to debate this.
Last edited by 2bpurrfect; 05-29-2015 at 11:06 AM..
(cont'd)...yeah, that's right. sounds kinda like what certain capitalistic persons wanna do to the working poor right now too.... cheap labor, bare subsistence, high profits. much like the slavery of the old south.
While it is a commonly help view that capitalism only persist on cheap labor, one must also look at how things are produced to get a better idea of the motivations of capitalist. Back when the USA economy was primarily focused on agriculture, slavery actually would have made good business sense. Paying each farm hand would have been prohibitively expensive, and as a result slave labor insured a 1 time payment to get several decades of work.
The problem, well at least one of many, is that slavery was only good when the crops that were planted were labor intensive and that is why slavery was important to the cash crops of rice, tobacco and cotton. But in the north, where even up to the eve of the civil war 80% of the population was engaged in agriculture slaves were no necessary for agricultural production.
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However things changed with automation and the industrial revolution. Because now machinary could now produce faster than a human being, it appears that the initial investment was better spent on machinary and not slaves. Slavery had to have been prohibitely expensive compared to automation solutions at the time. Let's look at why slavery probably became expensive...
This makes absolutely no sense. Automation in 1803 (the year that the slave trade was abolished)? Your premiss is not only ahistorical but economically wrong. Slavery was exceedingly profitable up until it was abolished. Just to simplify the discussion, I'll leave out the profitability of slave produced tobacco and rice and concentrate on cotton. From 1800 to 1860 cotton production rose from 186,000 bales to 4,000,000 and the number of slaves needed to produce those numbers rose from 700,000 in 1790 to 4,000,000 at upon the eve of the Civil War. And what of its profitability? Cotton represented 60% of all U.S. exports and 75% of the cotton used by British cotton mills.
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With the North pretty much taking the lead in the manufacturing game,
Which isn't saying much because while the northeast, to be exact, produced more industrial goods that the entire south, it was a drop in the bucket compared to the industrial out put of Europe in general and Great Britain in particular. U.S. imports far exceeded exports $181,411,137 to $66,961,535 respectively.
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And the south could not compete with the rampant growth in the North. It's highly doubtful that even withot the civial war, many southern farmers would have just went bankrupt anyway, freeing the slaves anyway.
It didn't need to compete when southern south was producing 75% of the world's cotton and 44% of the world's tobacco all produced by slaves.
No, slavery didn't meet its demise as a result of economic pressures, slavery ended because on one of those rare occasions, the world's great powers came to the conclusion that slavery was morally indefensible.
OP, as others have mentioned, the South remains predominantly agricultural today, and a significant portion of its other products are extractive: oil, natural gas, coal, and timber.
The plain fact is that Southern farmers did NOT adopt labor-saving equipment until they were forced to do so by the labor shortages that began in WW I when rural blacks started streaming out of the South for the cities of the Northeast, Midwest, and Far West in large numbers, which is known as the Great Migration. This movement out of the South became a flood from the 1930s and continued through the 1960s. It's no accident that it wasn't until the 1940s that the first mechanical cotton picker came on the market even though it had been invented a decade or two before.
Furthermore, as Jim Crow laws and segregation in law as well as resistance to desegregation shows, slavery was as much about controlling black people as it was a labor system. It was a labor system in the British colonies, and Britain was able to end it by law in 1833 with a program of gradual emancipation. All of the states that made up the Confederacy, and maybe all the other slave states as well, prohibited any kind of emancipation of slaves by the time of the Civil War. It was forbidden by law in most, if not all, slave states to teach slaves to read or write. Most slave states prohibited free blacks from living in them.
After Reconstruction, the Southern states systematically used violence to prevent blacks from voting, and then voted in politicians who passed Jim Crow laws designed to do the same things that antebellum "black codes" had done. Violence and intimidation of blacks to deprive them of their rights as citizens continued through the 1960s.
The plain fact is that Southern farmers did NOT adopt labor-saving equipment until they were forced to do so by the labor shortages that began in WW I when rural blacks started streaming out of the South for the cities of the Northeast, Midwest, and Far West in large numbers, which is known as the Great Migration.
An interesting fact is that in the aftermath of the Civil War there was an attempt by many former slaves to migrate out of the south, particularly to the west, but were forcefully prevented from doing so by the enforcement arm of the southern planting class... the Klan. Forced to remain in the South the system of tenement farming for all intents and purposes reestablished slavery by another name. And while during a brief period during Reconstruction, former slaves were able to exercise rights granted and enforced by the Grant administration, that came to a crashing halt with the Compromise of 1877 when the Republican Party sold out African Americans allowing not only the oppression of African Americans but their rank exploitation by their former slave owners.
Slavery has merely changed forms over the years. I suppose we can be proud that slaves are treated better today insofar as not fearing a beating or deathtrap work environments. There is no such thing as a free market, however.
The classic was "Capitalism and Slavery" by Eric Williams. There's been a lot written on this; those two books are the latest in one of the more hotly debated historical debates that has gone on for decades.
Long story short, no. If anything, slavery was more profitable as the Civil War approached than it was in earlier periods. It was becoming more and more of a wealth inequality issue though as southern whites who wanted to become planters were having a harder and harder time of doing so because it was impossible to compete with the already existing big players. Slavery was very profitable but only if you were one of the big players. Slave capital in 1860 was worth more than any other single source of capital.
There is, of course, the side of the debate that says "yes" but in my view the evidence leans toward "no." Slavery was integral to the formation of modern capitalism.
But when you think about it, whether you like it or not, capitalism killed slavery in America. We can always give it to the civil war, but we all know America isn't kind enough to just end something that was making money. The reality is probably that there was no money in slavery anymore, and was just officially put out of it's misery.
Nonsense! Too much education is a bad thing.
American slavery didn't end when Lincoln signed the Emancipation Proclamation in 1863. It continued for more than another 100 years after the Civil War ended. It was called SHARECROPPING, which is just a euphemism for slavery. --And it was a very profitable relationship between the white landowners and their black tenants (a/k/a slaves.).
There was a marvelous book that appeared about 4 or 5 years ago called Slavery By Another Name, by a Wall Street Journal reporter named Douglas Blackmon. (The book won the Pulitzer for history.) Slavery in America continued well into the 1960's and early 1970's.
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